The major parties have long issued certifications after each national presidential candidate to each state, for the purpose of informing each state’s elections officials which names to print on the November ballot for president and vice-president for that particular party. Here are the certifications sent to the South Dakota Secretary of State for both major parties from 2004. Here are the certifications from both major parties to South Dakota in 2008. They show that in both 2004 and 2008, the Republican certifications asserted that their nominees met the constitutional qualifications. By contrast, it happens that the Democratic certifications did not discuss whether their nominees met the constitutional qualifications.

The major parties (and minor parties as well) are free to word their certifications any way they wish. No government, federal or state, tells the national parties how to prepare their certifications, or what information they should contain. The information is only relevant because of the assertion made by J. B. Williams a few days ago that for some reason, the Democratic Party national convention officials in 2008 prepared a certification that did assert that the party’s national nominees meet the constitutional qualifications, but then apparently junked that version and went with another version that did not mention the constitutional qualifications.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, will hear Unity08 v Federal Election Commission on October 15, 2009, at 9:30 a.m. The panel consists of Judges Douglas H. Ginsburg, Karen Henderson, and Stephen Williams. The issue is whether the FEC was correct when it told Unity ’08 in 2006 that no one could contribute more than $5,000.

Judges Ginsburg and Henderson were part of the panel that ruled that the U.S. Post Office could not ban petition circulators on post office sidewalks that are parallel to public streets, in 2005. That case was called Initiative & Referendum Institute v U.S. Postal Service. The panel remanded the case back to the U.S. District Court to decide the other half of the case, interior sidewalks, and there is still no decision on that from the U.S. District Court.

Judge Henderson also was one of the judges in McConnell v FEC, and her May 2, 2003 concurring opinion in that case struck down limits on individual contributions to political party national committees (however, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld them later that year in a 5-4 decision).

The September 14 U.S. edition of Metro has this story about Frances Villar’s campaign for Mayor of New York city. Villar is the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Metro is an international daily newspaper published in 100 cities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In the U.S. it exists in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.