On April 8, Ralph Nader’s attorneys filed this 34-page brief in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, in Nader v Maine Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee, et al. This is Nader’s lawsuit, suing the Democratic Party for its actions to keep him off ballots in the 2004 presidential election. The lower court in Maine had not ruled on the substance of the lawsuit, but had found procedural reasons for not permitting a trial.
On April 6, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee amended SB 100 and passed the bill. As amended, the primary would continue to be in the first week in March. But the run-off primary moves from the 2nd Tuesday in April, to the 4th Tuesday in May.
If the bill passes in that form, in 2012, the petition deadline to put a new or minor party on the ballot would remain unchanged, and would be May 20. But the run-off primary would not be until May 22. Texas is the only state that does not permit primary voters to sign a petition for a new or minor party. But, under the literal language of the law, if SB 100 passes in its existing form, a voter could sign for a party petition and still vote in a run-off primary, and the signature would count.
Most Texas legislators have a rigid conviction that it would be bad public policy to permit a voter to sign a ballot access petition for a new or minor party and still participate in the primary of a major party. However, this bill breaches that way of thinking.
Last month, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party each submitted a petition to be on the Maryland ballot in 2012 and 2014. The law requires 10,000 valid signatures. Both petitions were recently found insufficient by the State Board of Elections. However, the Board has agreed not to automatically convert all the registered members of those parties to independent voters.
The two parties are planning to file a lawsuit in state court very soon, over the standards for checking signature validity. The Board used a standard that rejects all signatures if the form of the name on the petition is not an exact match for the name on the voter registration records. For example, if a signer uses a middle initial, but that middle initial does not appear on the voter registration record (or vice versa), the signature is invalid.
It is likely that the lawsuit will win. Recently, the State Appeals Court (the highest state court in Maryland) ruled that signatures that are illegible are valid, assuming the printed name and address match the voter registration record. The same logic that won that case should apply to the parallel issue involved in the new lawsuit.
On April 7, the Oklahoma House Rules Committee passed SB 91. It requires birth certificates for presidential candidates. The bill had passed the Senate on March 14.
On April 4, Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe signed HB 1827. It moves the petition deadline for a new party from late June to early April. If this bill had been in effect in 2010, the petition deadline would not have been June 30; it would have been April 3. The bill had been introduced on March 3 and made speedy progress through the legislature.
The bill also requires newly-qualifying parties to hold their nominating conventions no later than primary day, which is mid-May in Arkansas. The motive for the bill seems to be that in 2006, 2008, and 2010, the old law had permitted the Green Party (which had to petition each of those years) to hold a nominating convention after the major party primaries were over. This made it possible for the Green Party to enter nominees in races for which the major parties had not nominated anyone. This is how the Green Party elected a state legislator in 2008 and a partisan county official in 2010.
It is likely that the new petition deadline, if challenged, would be found unconstitutional. It forces parties to collect signatures in the winter, unless they qualify in the year before the election (the petition must be completed in 90 days). The law could have provided that the party nominating convention be simultaneous, or even a little bit earlier, than the date the petition is submitted. In 1977 a U.S. District Court Judge in Arkansas invalidated the old deadline for a party petition. The judge in the 1977 case couldn’t tell if the petition deadline was in late February or late March, but he said no matter when the deadline was, it was unconstitutionally early. That case was American Party of Arkansas v Jernigan, 424 F.Supp. 943.
