The Independent Party of Connecticut expects to qualify a full slate of candidates for all the statewide offices this year.  See this story.  The party already has 11,000 signatures on its statewide petition.  The law requires 7,500.

Although the Libertarian Party and the Green Party are ballot-qualified for some of the lesser statewide offices in Connecticut, they are not ballot-qualified for Governor or U.S. Senator and they are not petitioning this year for Governor or U.S. Senator.  Therefore, it is likely that the Independent Party nominee for Governor will be the only ballot-listed opponent of the Democratic and Republican Parties for Governor.  For U.S. Senator, the Connecticut for Lieberman Party is ballot-qualified and will have a nominee.  Although the Working Families Party will also be on the 2010 ballot for all the statewide offices, it will be cross-endorsing all the Democratic statewide nominees.

The Independent Party is already ballot-qualified for President in Connecticut, and for U.S. House in the 5th district, and in 15 state legislative districts.  But it hasn’t had ballot-status for the state statewide offices.  Connecticut is the only state in which a party’s qualified status is on an office-by-office basis.  A party that polled 1% for any particular office in the last election is automatically on the ballot for that particular office.  The party ran Ralph Nader for President in Connecticut in 2008.  Thanks to ThirdPartyDaily for the link.

On July 22, independent candidate Ieshuh Griffin filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee, over the state elections office refusal to print her partisan label on the November ballot.  She is running for Assembly, 10th district, and wants “Not the ‘whiteman’s bitch’ ” on the ballot.  The state elections office won’t print that.  The law says independent candidates can choose up to five words to describe their political principle.

The case is Griffin v Government Accountability Board, 10-cv-617.  It has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Randa.  Here is her Complaint.

On July 22, Mary Norwood, independent candidate for Chair of the Fulton County (Georgia) Commission, filed a lawsuit in state court in Atlanta.  The case is Norwood v Fulton  County Board of Registration and Elections, 2010-cv-188643.  A state law requires her to have paid her filing fee by noon on July 2, even though he petition was not due until July 13.  She did pay the fee on July 2, but at 4:40 p.m.  The lawsuit argues that substantial compliance should control this situation.

Meanwhile, county elections officials are checking her petition to see if she has the needed 22,500 (approximately) signatures.  She submitted approximately 33,000.

Georgia law has very few precedents on substantial compliance for independent candidate petitions.  The requirements are so difficult, it is rare for anyone to even try to get on the ballot as an independent candidate in Georgia.  No independent candidate petitions requiring as many as 22,000 valid signatures have succeeded in Georgia since Georgia first started requiring petitions for independent candidates in 1943, except for two independent presidential petitions, those of John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992.

Norwood had filed an earlier ballot access lawsuit on June 22, to validate her petition sheets in which the name “Fulton County” had been pre-printed on each signature line, so that the signer would not need to add this.  The judge in that case refused to rule either way, but later the Fulton County Election Board voted to accept those petition sheets.