Tennessee’s state Elections Commissioner, Mark Goins, has decided to list Republican nominees first on general election ballots, starting next month in a special election. See this story. In the recent past, Democratic nominees have been listed first.

It is somewhat likely that state law, giving discretion to the Elections Commissioner, is unconstitutional. The 7th circuit long ago ruled that it is unconstitutional to let county elections officials enjoy discretion as to which parties to list first on the ballot, and U.S. District Courts in Oklahoma and New Mexico made similar rulings.

Back on November 18, 2008, a federal jury in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had awarded Denise Carey $67,000 in her lawsuit against her home city of Wilkes-Barre. Carey in 2004 had headed up a local initiative petition. After her petition had been rejected because of a challenge to the validity of the signatures, the state court that had rejected her petition had ordered her to to pay $11,056 to the people who had challenged her initiative petition. Carey had then sued Wilkes-Barre, arguing that such an order violates her First Amendment rights. The federal jury that heard her case had awarded damages to her.

On September 18, 2009, the U.S. District Court Judge in Carey’s federal case rejected Wilkes-Barre’s attempt to set aside the jury verdict. The city says it will now appeal the ruling to the Third Circuit. Thanks to Carl Romanelli for this news. Here is a news story.

On September 16, the Libertarian Party of Maine lost its federal lawsuit against Maine’s system of having one deadline to submit independent candidate petitions to town clerks, and a separate deadline, one week later, to get the signatures from the town clerks to the Secretary of State. Libertarian Party of Maine v Dunlap, cv-08-288. The decision was not a surprise, since the judge had refused to issue injunctive relief in the same case last year. The party pointed out that candidates who petition to get on the primary ballot only face one deadline, but the decision says, in effect, that there are lots of differences between the petitioning process for primary candidates and the process for general election candidates, and such differences aren’t inherently unconstitutional.

IndependentPoliticalReport has a good discussion going of why the Maine Libertarian petition for Bob Barr last year, which required 4,000 signatures by mid-August 2008, did not succeed. See here.