The 11th circuit will hold a hearing in Coffield v Handel on Thursday, March 4. The issue is the Georgia ballot access procedure for independent and minor party candidates for U.S. House. Georgia requires a petition signed by 5% of the number of registered voters. In practice, this requirement is so difficult, no one has been able to complete that petition, for U.S. House, since 1964. Back in 1964, the signatures were not due until October, and were not checked. Also no congressional district boundaries split any county, so it was easy for petitioners to know whether any potential signer was a resident of any particular congressional district.

The three judges will be William Barbour, James Edmondson, and Stanley Marcus. Judge Barbour is a visiting U.S. District Court Judge from Mississippi. He is a Reagan appointee and has never had a ballot access case involving minor parties or independent candidates (such cases don’t exist in Mississippi, because the ballot laws are so easy). He did have a case on residency requirements for initiative circulators. In Kean v Clark, 56 F Supp 2d 719 (1999), he upheld Mississippi’s requirement that initiative circulators live in the state, but he struck down a related law that said that requirement could be applied against an initiative campaign that had began working before the in-state requirement had been created.

Judge Edmondson, a Reagan appointee from Georgia, has never had a ballot access case involving the number of signatures. He was on a panel in 1997 in Natural Law Party v Massey, where the issue was whether Georgia had violated due process in 1996, by invalidating petitions on the grounds that many of the signatures had been notarized by a notary public who had herself circulated a few pages of the petition. The lower court had upheld the state. The 11th circuit panel on which Judge Edmondson sat had said the case is moot.

Judge Edmondson wrote the 2-1 decision in Chandler v Miller, upholding Georgia’s law requiring candidates for state and local office to take drug tests. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed the 11th circuit and struck down the law.

Judge Edmondson was on an 11th circuit panel in 1996 that upheld Florida’s July 15 petition deadline for minor party presidential petitions.

Judge Marcus is a Clinton appointee from Florida. In 1998 he wrote the decision in Socialist Workers Party v Leahy, 145 F 3d 1240, striking down a Florida law that required minor parties to post a bond. The lower court had upheld the requirement. Also, in Swanson v Bennett, an Alabama case challenging the number of signatures required for minor party and independent candidates other than presidential independents, at oral argument he seemed favorable to Swanson. He was skeptical that Alabama had any good reason for requiring 36,000 signatures for Swanson (an independent candidate for U.S. Senator) when Alabama only required 5,000 for independent candidates for president. But, in the end, he signed the decision upholding the law.

According to this news story, the state chair of the South Carolina Republican Party said the party will soon file a lawsuit to win a closed primary for itself.

The party might lose such a lawsuit, however. The Virginia Republican Party already had a similar lawsuit, and the 4th circuit said the party only has a right to insist on a closed primary for itself in instances at which the party has no choice but to nominate by primary. Both Virginia and South Carolina are in the 4th circuit, so the Virginia precedent will control. The Virginia case is Miller v Brown, 462 F 3d 312 (2006). South Carolina law says any qualified party is free to nominate by convention or primary. The party decides. Major parties in South Carolina always choose a primary, instead of a convention, but because the party is legally free to choose a convention, it will have difficulty winning the lawsuit.

One of the ironies is that the South Carolina state Republican chair made this promise to a Tea Party meeting. Yet in Texas, which also has open primaries, polls have shown that the 2010 gubernatorial candidate favored by Tea Party activists, Debra Medina, receives more popular support from self-described independent voters than she does from self-described Republican voters.

The Los Angeles Times of February 15 has this story, saying Michael Ni, a California voter, recently signed a statewide initiative petition electronically. He hopes the San Mateo County Elections Department will give him an opinion as to whether his signature is valid or not. However, because he signed a statewide initiative petition (concerning marijuana policy) that has enough valid signatures statewide in any event, it seems possible that no definitive ruling concerning his individual signature will be made.

California is now in the season during which candidates running in the June 2010 primary are circulating signatures to get themselves on a primary ballot. Candidates who are members of parties that have registration membership under 5% of the state total need 150 signatures in lieu of a filing fee. Those signatures are due February 25. Ni would be more likely to get a ruling on the validity of an electronic signature if he changed his registration to membership in one of California’s four qualified minor parties (unless possibly he already is a member of such a party), and then if he signed for a candidate circulating such a petition. All of the signatures of such petitions are checked for validity. By contrast, generally the validity of statewide initiatives is determined with a random sample of signatures. Thanks to Michael Warnken for the link.