The Carolina Journal has this story about the court decision on January 23 won by Cornel West.
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On Friday, January 23, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray issued a press release, listing his five priorities for changing Wyoming election law in thi year’s legislative session. See this story. He did not mention ballot access. Yet in November 2025 he had said he would again try to persuade the legislature to increase the number of signatures for independent candidates, from 2% of the last U.S. House vote to 3% for statewide office and 5% for district office.
On January 23, U.S. District Court Judge Terrance Boyle ruled that it was unconstitutional for the North Carolina State Election Board to try to keep the Justice for All Party off the ballot even though the party had enough valid signatures. The Justice for All Party had been formed to put Cornel West on the ballot as a 2024 presidential candidate.
West and his party did get on the ballot in North Carolina in 2024, because Judge Boyle has granted him an injunction. But the Board’s action had not yet been declared unconstitutional, until now.
Here is the 10-page decision. The State Board had argued that the case is moot. But the judge pointed out that the Board had behaved badly twice, in 2022 when it voted to keep the Green Party off the ballot even though it also had enough valid signatures; and again in 2024 concerning the Justice for All Party.
Each time the Board had behaved as it did, Democrats had had a majority on the Board, and they had refused to certify the parties because they wanted to know if petitioners had misinformed potential signers. Republican members of the Board had always wanted to certify the parties.
Arizona law says the number of signatures for independent candidates in 2026 is 3% of the number of registered voters who aren’t members of a qualified party, as of the January 2026 registration tally. The tally is now on the Secretary of State’s website. The number of signatures for a statewide independent will be 44,539. By comparison, in 2024 it was 41,090.
On January 16, the Virginia legislature passed HJR 2, a proposed constitutional amendment that ends the practice of preventing felons from registering to vote, once they have served their sentences. Now it will go to a vote of the people.
Assuming the amendment becomes law, there will be an indirect boost for ballot access, because approximately 300,000 Virginians who could not previously sign petitions will be able to sign petitions. The Virginia petition requirements for minor party and independent candidates require a fixed number of signatures, not a percentage of the last vote. So an increase in the number of registered voters does not cause the number of signatures to rise.