Indiana Circuit Court Judges are elected on a partisan basis. Indiana holds its primary this year on May 4. Two candidates are on the Democratic ballot in Lake County for Circuit Court Judge. However, a lawsuit has been filed to remove one of them, Alex Dominguez, from the ballot, because he failed to sign his declaration of candidacy form. However, he did sign on the back of the form, in a space that asks the candidate to confirm awareness of the campaign finance laws. See this story in the Post-Tribune of Merrillville, Indiana.

Because the county probably wants to print the primary ballots very soon, this case will be decided quickly. Indiana does not permit write-ins in primaries, so if Dominguez is removed from the primary ballot, only one candidate will remain on the ballot, and he will be the nominee automatically.

On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence F. Stengel issued a 22-page opinion in Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Cortes, 5:09-cv-1691, eastern district. The opinion says plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the Pennsylvania system of using courts to determine if petitions are valid, and assessing court costs against candidates whose petitions are deemed not to have enough signatures.

Judge Stengel didn’t even comment on the other three issues in the case. One issue was the systematic refusal of the Pennsylvania Department of Elections to tally write-ins, in most cases (for example, in 2008, the Department arbitrarily tallied the write-ins for Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, but refused to tally them for Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney). Pennsylvania has no procedure by which write-in candidates may file a declaration of candidacy, so in theory Pennsylvania ought to count all write-ins.

A closely related issue is that many counties in Pennsylvania don’t canvass any write-ins.

The other unmentioned issue in the decision is the 15% registration threshold for a party to be fully ballot-qualified. It is very likely that plaintiffs Constitution Party, Green Party, and Libertarian Party, will appeal.

On April 1, the Arizona House Judiciary Committee failed to pass either bill that would ask the voters to deprive the public funding program of any revenue. See this story. The bills lacked one vote, so they were put over until next week.