On June 7, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear two ballot access cases, one from Alabama and one from Louisiana. The Alabama case, Shugart v Chapman, 09-1221, challenged the number of signatures needed to put an independent candidate for U.S. House on the ballot, given that the state required more signatures for him than for an independent presidential candidate.

The Louisiana case involved whether Bob Barr should have been on the ballot in Louisiana. The Governor of Louisiana had set a later deadline, which Barr met, but the Secretary of State had set an earlier deadline than the Governor’s deadline, which Barr did not meet. The changes in deadlines were because of hurricanes. That case was called Libertarian Party v Dardenne, 09-1223.

The U.S. Supreme Court also refused to hear Rodearmel v Clinton, 09-797, which is not an election law case. It concerned whether Article I of the U.S. Constitution was violated when Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. Article I, section 6, says no member of Congress is eligible to an appointed position if that person had been in Congress when the salary of that position had been raised. Congress had raised the salary of Secretary of State while Clinton had been a U.S. Senator. But when Clinton was appointed, Congress had lowered the salary back to what it had been before that raise.

Socialist Action has nominated a candidate for U.S. House in Connecticut’s First District, and is petitioning to place him on the ballot. He is Christopher Hutchinson. He needs almost 3,000 valid signatures by August 4.

If he gets on the ballot, he will be the first Connecticut congressional candidate of a party that holds itself out as advocating socialism, since the Communist Party had a candidate on the Connecticut ballot for U.S. House in 1982.

Socialist Action was formed decades ago by people who had been members of the Socialist Workers Party, but who left that party. It has never run a presidential candidate of its own, and it has almost never had any candidates for any partisan office. It is headquartered in San Francisco.

Brad Smith of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, has been diligently seeking to qualify as an independent candidate for the U.S. House since September 2009. He wants to be on the November 2010 ballot in the 5th district. The law requires him to submit 18,123 valid signatures by June 10. He has submitted 10,000 signatures so far, of which approximately 7,500 have been validated.

No one has ever qualified as an independent candidate for U.S. House in North Carolina in the entire history of government-printed ballots, which have existed in that state since 1901. On June 4, Smith filed to intervene in Greene v Bartlett, the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in 2008 to overturn the North Carolina ballot access law for independent candidates for U.S. House. The case is awaiting a decision.

Smith’s intervention will strengthen the lawsuit.