On September 20, Ralph Nader’s attorney submitted 275 pages of affidavits, from 14 individuals, explaining what the Democratic National Committee and some of its allies did to Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign.  The evidence includes affidavits from some of his circulators, who were subject to pressure to stop them from working.  The evidence is for the case now pending state court in Maine.  The volume of this evidence is sufficiently lengthy that the judge is postponing the hearing until November 5, to give the other side a chance to digest that evidence.  The evidence focuses on what happened in 2004 in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.

New York state law lets two qualified parties jointly nominate the same person.  The law also allows a qualified party and an unqualified party to jointly nominate the same person.  If that happens, the candidate’s name is listed on the ballot twice.  But if someone is nominated by two unqualified parties, his or her name is only listed once.

Randy Credico has been nominated for U.S. Senate, full term, by both the Libertarian Party, and the Anti-Prohibition Party.  But the State Board of Elections has told him his name can be listed only once on the ballot, and that he must choose one line.  He expects to file a lawsuit to be appear twice.  In 1971, a 3-judge U.S. District Court said that a former law, forbidding an unqualified party and a qualified party from jointly nominating the same person, for most offices, was unconstitutional.  That case was United Ossining Party v Hayduk.  The logic of that decision should help Credico.

Especially telling is that many prominent New York major party nominees have been nominated by three qualified parties, so their names appear three times on the ballot.  For instance, Andrew Cuomo is listed three times as a gubernatorial nominee:  as a Democrat, a Working Families nominee, and an Independence Party nominee.

On September 20, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Haynes, a Clinton appointee, struck down Tennessee’s laws on how a previously unqualified party can get on the ballot.  Libertarian Party of Tennessee v Goins, 3:08-cv-00063.  The case had been filed by the Libertarian, Constitution and Green Parties of Tennessee back on January 23, 2008.  The decision says that the combination of the early petition deadline, the high number of signatures, and the wording on the petition saying the signers are members, taken together, is too severe.

Tennessee’s law has existed since 1972, and in all the years it has existed, it has never been used.  It requires a petition of 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, due four months before the August primary.  Parties that have tried and failed to qualify in Tennessee have been the Populist Party of the 1980’s, the Reform Party, the Constitution Party, and the Green Party.  The Libertarian Party has never actually tried to qualify because the law is so harsh.  Currently, it requires 45,464 signatures.

The decision will have no impact on the 2010 election because the parties had not asked for injunctive relief.  Tennessee is in the 6th circuit, and the decision depends partly on the 2006 decision of the Sixth Circuit that had struck down the Ohio ballot access law for new parties.  If the state does not appeal, the legislature in 2011 will probably pass a better law.  The Tennessee and Ohio laws are very similar; both states require newly-qualifying parties to hold a primary, which is why the deadlines for a new party are so early.  Most states, by contrast, provide that newly-qualifying parties may nominate by convention, which makes it possible for those states to have a later petition deadline.