On June 16, the 7th circuit released a 40-page opinion in Gerald A. Judge v Governor Pat Quinn, 09-2219. The issue was whether Illinois must hold a special election for President Obama’s old Senate seat earlier than November 2010. Even if Obama had not been elected President, his seat, the Class III seat, would have been up in November 2010 anyway.

The 7th circuit said that the U.S. District Court had been correct to deny injunctive relief, and that the plaintiffs had no right to expect a special election in 2009. But, the decision suggests that the state must hold a special election for that seat on November 2, 2010, to fill that seat for the short amount of time remaining in the current term. Thus, Illinois will probably be required not only to hold the normal election for that seat for the term January 2011-January 2017, but to also hold a simultaneous election to fill that same seat for the period November 2010 through January 2011.

Because of legal technicalities, the issue was not fully resolved, and the U.S. District Court will hold a new hearing in the case on June 23.

On Thursday, June 17, two important ballot access lawsuits were argued in two different federal courts.

In U.S. District Court in Arkansas, Judge Price Marshall heard Green Party of Arkansas v Daniels. See this story. The story is not is as well-written as it could be. The lawsuit concerns the state’s rules on how a party retains its spot on the ballot, not on how it gets on the ballot. This is a tough case to win, because there is no federal court precedent from any state striking down the requirements for a party to retain its spot on the ballot. A somewhat similar case is pending for the New Mexico Green Party.

Also on June 17, the 9th circuit, meeting in Honolulu, heard Ralph Nader’s case from 2004 that challenges the number of signatures for an independent presidential candidate, which is six times as many signatures as are required for a party to get itself on the ballot. Nader argues that there is no rational reason to make ballot access for a single independent candidate more difficult than for a new party. In Hawaii, when a new party qualifies, the state must print up a primary ballot for it and the party is easily able to run for many partisan offices. If the chief rationale for ballot access restrictions is to keep ballots from being too crowded, the Hawaii policy makes no sense.

Judge Richard Clifton seemed to feel that if a state wants to encourage people to form parties instead of becoming independent candidates, a state may legitimately do that. The other two judges, Betty Fletcher and Harry Pregerson, asked few questions and didn’t seem especially interested in the case. The case is Nader v Cronin, 08-16444. No newspaper seems to have covered the hearing.

On June 17, the Arkansas Green Party submitted 14,300 signatures on a petition to place the party back on the ballot. 10,000 are required. If the petition is approved, that will be the third election year in a row in which the Green Party has completed this petition. The only other party that has ever qualified by petition in Arkansas is the Reform Party, which completed the petition once, in 1996.

Before 1971, Arkansas allowed any party to be on the ballot with no petition.

Arkansas allows parties to be on the ballot for President only, with a petition of 1,000 signatures, and many parties have completed that petition. Arkansas is the only state in which no Libertarian Party member has ever been on the ballot for partisan office other than President.