The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Forrest Claypool will run for Assessor of Cook County, Illinois, as an independent candidate. He is a well-known reformer with substantial credentials. See this story. He will need 25,000 valid signatures between now and June 21.
On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence F. Stengel issued a 22-page opinion in Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Cortes, 5:09-cv-1691, eastern district. The opinion says plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the Pennsylvania system of using courts to determine if petitions are valid, and assessing court costs against candidates whose petitions are deemed not to have enough signatures.
Judge Stengel didn’t even comment on the other three issues in the case. One issue was the systematic refusal of the Pennsylvania Department of Elections to tally write-ins, in most cases (for example, in 2008, the Department arbitrarily tallied the write-ins for Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, but refused to tally them for Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney). Pennsylvania has no procedure by which write-in candidates may file a declaration of candidacy, so in theory Pennsylvania ought to count all write-ins.
A closely related issue is that many counties in Pennsylvania don’t canvass any write-ins.
The other unmentioned issue in the decision is the 15% registration threshold for a party to be fully ballot-qualified. It is very likely that plaintiffs Constitution Party, Green Party, and Libertarian Party, will appeal.
On April 1, the Hawaii House refused to accept the Senate amendment to HB 2397. The bill moves the primary from September to August. The Senate doesn’t want the bill to take effect this year and amended the bill so that it takes effect in 2050 (not a typo). But the House rejected the Senate amendment.
On April 1, the Arizona House Judiciary Committee failed to pass either bill that would ask the voters to deprive the public funding program of any revenue. See this story. The bills lacked one vote, so they were put over until next week.
Arizona HB 2441, to require presidential candidates to submit proof of meeting the constitutional qualifications when they file to be on the ballot, appears dead. Although it passed its first committee hurdle in January, it has not made any progress since. Here is a link to the bill.
