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 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.