On June 3, the Libertarian Party sued the Virginia State Board of Elections over that state’s rigid rules on residency of petition circulators. No one may circulate a petition to get a candidate on the ballot for a district office, unless that circulator lives in that district. The case is Libertarian Party of Virginia v Virginia State Board of Elections, filed in U.S. District Court, Alexandria, 1:10-cv-615.

There are lawsuits on this issue now pending in California, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, although Kansas has informally indicated that it will concede the issue. The recent Idaho case won on April 9, 2010, is now over, because the state did not appeal. Lawsuits on this issue have also won in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, in the last ten years.

The Ohio legislature is about to go on recess, probably for several months. The legislature still hasn’t passed any bill to replace the old, unconstitutional ballot access law. The decision striking down the old law was in September 2006, so it will have been almost four years that Ohio has been without a valid law.

Ballot access improvements are contained in HB 260 and SB 8, which are very lengthy bills that deal with many election law issues. Those bills are hundreds of pages long, and many people have worked very hard to write those bills, but the consensus is that no such bill will make any headway until after the November 2010 election.

On June 4, an attorney for the Socialist Party of New Jersey sent a letter to the New Jersey Division of Elections, asking that the state permit voters to register as members of the Socialist Party on voter registration forms.

In 2001, a New Jersey state court ruled that the old policy, of refusing to let voters register into any party unless it met the state’s restrictive definition of “political party”, violates the U.S. Constitution. In response, the New Jersey Elections Division started letting people register as members of the five qualified parties that brought the lawsuit. They were the Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law and Reform Parties. Ever since, voters have been permitted to register into those parties.

In 2007, the Conservative Party sued for the same right, and the state gave in and let voters register into the Conservative Party. But the state has never changed its election law, nor issued any regulations, giving neutral rules on which unqualified parties may enjoy this opportunity, or even any rules on how such an unqualified party may request it.

The Socialist Party clearly has the same characteristics of the other parties that already have registration rights. The party appeared on the statewide ballot in 2006, 2008, and 2009. This year there are no statewide offices up in New Jersey.