On July 8, the West Virginia Attorney General ruled that the state is free to hold a special election for U.S. Senate on November 2, 2010, even if the legislature does nothing. The Attorney General said that the Governor is free to proclaim a special primary election date. See this story.
Mary Norwood, independent candidate for Chair of the Fulton County, Georgia Commission, plans to submit more than 44,000 valid signatures on the petition deadline, July 13. She also plans to sue to overturn the law that says an independent candidate must file a declaration of candidacy several weeks before the petition itself is due.
The Georgia primary is July 20, and the run-off primary is August 10. Independent candidates, of course, do not run in partisan primaries.
Courts that have ruled that independent candidate deadlines cannot be earlier than the primary (or the day before the primary) included the US Courts of Appeals in the 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 11th circuits, and also U.S. District Courts and state courts in certain states that are not in those circuits, namely Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Georgia is in the 11th circuit. The 11th circuit case that struck down an early petition deadline for independent candidates is New Alliance Party of Alabama v Hand, 933 F 2d 1568 (1991). Norwood does not plan to contest the petition deadline of July 13, just the July 2 deadline for paying the filing fee.
Georgia is one of only five states that requires an independent candidate to file a declaration of candidacy in advance of actually submitting the petition. The others are Kentucky (but only candidates for state office, not federal office), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Texas. West Virginia formerly had such a law but it was repealed in 2009. South Carolina formerly had such a law but it was invalidated in Cromer v State in 1990.
Earlier this year, Florida voters put two initiatives on the November 2010 ballot to require non-partisan redistricting for state legislative seats and U.S. House seats. They will be on the ballot as Amendments 5 and 6. In response, the state legislature put another redistricting proposal on the ballot, Amendment 7, which would counteract the initiatives. See this story.
However, on July 8, a lower state court judge removed Amendment 7 from the ballot on the grounds that it is not only too vague to be constitutional, but that it would remove from the Constitution provisions that require districts to be contiguous. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the news.
The well-known politics blog Firedoglake published this article on July 7, about the on-line petition going around among Pennsylvania Democrats, that the Pennsylvania Democratic Party support ballot access for minor parties, and especially that Pennsylvania Democrats repudiate challenging their petitions.
Kristin Davis, candidate for Governor of New York, needs 15,000 signatures to appear on the November 2010 ballot. Petitioning started in New York on July 6. Davis will use the partisan label “Anti-Prohibition”. She had earlier hoped to receive the Libertarian Party nomination, but the Libertarian Party chose Warren Redlich for Governor instead.
If Davis gets as many as 50,000 votes, the “Anti-Prohibition Party” will be ballot-qualified in New York state for the next four years. She wants to end the prohibition of marijuana, casino gambling, same-sex marriage, and paying for sex. New York ballots provide for a symbol, or “logo”, on the ballot. Her logo will be a marijuana leaf.
