The Hartford Courant has this story on Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz’s response to a Green Party press release that criticized her. Bysiewicz says that she favors equal treatment for minor party candidates, and particularly equal treatment for public funding.
Candidate filing for Rhode Island closed on June 30. Although independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, do not need to submit petitions until July 22, the law requires them to file a declaration of candidacy by June 30. Five independents filed for the U.S. House, First District. Two filed for the U.S. House, Second District. Each will need 500 valid signatures. Rhode Island does not have a U.S. Senate election this year.
Independents in Rhode Island, and in about half the states, are permitted to choose a partisan label to be printed on the ballot next to their names, as long as it does not mimic the name of a qualified party. All of the independents in Rhode Island this year chose the label “independent”, except that one chose “Legalize Freedom”, and one chose “Robot Skeleton.”
Rhode Island has three qualified parties, Democratic, Republican, and Moderate. No one filed in the Moderate Party primary for Congress. However, the Moderate Party has candidates in its primary for Governor, Attorney General, two State Senate seats, three State House seats, and partisan city offices in Bristol and Cranston.
U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan, a Bush Jr. appointee, holds a hearing on June 30, at 11 a.m., in Angle v Miller, 2:09-cv-1969. The case challenges a Nevada law that says initiative circulators must sign a statement that all the signers are registered voters. The lawsuit complains that the circulators can’t know that information, and it is intimidating to force them to sign a statement that isn’t true.
The case also challenges the distribution requirement for initiatives. Proponents must collect a substantial number of signatures in each of the three U.S. House districts. That part of the lawsuit will be difficult to win. No court has ever invalidated a distribution requirement for statewide petitions that is based on U.S. House districts, because U.S. House districts have equal populations, at least at the beginning of any decade. Finally, the lawsuit challenges Nevada’s extremely strict single-subject rule. See this story. The plaintiff in this case is Sharron Angle, who was not particularly famous in 2009 when she filed the case. She is this year’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.
On June 30, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the state’s law, requiring voters at the polls to show a government photo-ID that has not expired. However, the Court left open the opportunity for an as-applied challenge by a voter who may be able to show that the requirement for that particular voter is burdensome. The only plaintiff in the case decided on June 30 is the Indiana League of Women Voters.
The vote was 4-1. Here is the decision.
The Arkansas Secretary of State has checked the Green Party’s ballot access petition and found it sufficient. The party needed 10,000 valid signatures and submitted 14,207. The Secretary of State says there are 11,505 valid signatures, for a validity rate of 81.0%.
This is the third election year in a row that the Green Party has successfully completed this petition. The only other party that ever completed it was the Reform Party, in 1996.
Arkansas did not require any petition for a party to appear on the ballot until 1971. Parties merely had to hold a nominating convention and certify the names of the nominees to the Secretary of State, before 1971.
The Arkansas Green Party is currently in court, not against the 10,000 signature petition, but against the state law that says a party should lose its qualified status after a presidential election if it doesn’t poll as much as 3% of the vote for President.
