USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques here advocates that No Labels nominate Nikki Haley for president and Dean Phillips for vice-president.
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On February 13, the Tennessee Libertarian Party filed this brief in Darnell v Hargett, m.d., 3:23cv-1266. This is the lawsuit filed to overturn the requirements for a group to get on the ballot as a party. The brief emphasizes that the Sixth Circuit struck down Michigan’s statewide independent petition of 30,000 signatures in 2021, in Graveline v Benson. Both Michigan and Tennessee are in the Sixth Circuit, so the Graveline decision is precedent for this lawsuit. The Tennessee party petition is 43,498 signatures this year (2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote).
Although the Forward Party is not ballot-qualified in Virginia, it recently qualified to have any nominees it may have this year use the party label. In Virginia, there is no petition to create a ballot-qualified party. Instead there are only candidate petitions. The candidates may use their party label only if that party has shown that it has a state committee with a representative from each U.S. House district. The State Board of Elections has determined that the Forward Party has such a committee.
This status is only useful if the party has any successful petitioning candidates this year. In Virginia, in even-years, there are no regularly-scheduled elections for state office, but there are for Congress. Presumably the Forward Party will have some congressional candidates this year; otherwise there would have been no point in getting the right to use a party label.
Although Virginia has some partisan county and city elections, there are no party labels in those elections.
On February 5, Utah filed this brief in defense of its law that prohibits paying initiative petition circulators on a per-signature basis. Maxfield v Henderson, 4:23cv-112. The state also defends its law that requires initiative circulators to wear a badge that says if they are being paid or not. The badge does not identify the circulator.
Slate has an article by Brook Thomas, pointing out that there were no government-printed ballots in the United States before 1888. Thomas feels the need to write this because Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar had an op-ed in the New York Times of February 7 that says, “Lincoln was not on the ballot in some states in 1860”. Amar also made that error in his U.S. Supreme Court amicus in the Colorado Trump ballot access case.
Lincoln didn’t receive any votes in most southern states in 1860 because no one organized a slate of Republican presidential elector candidates in those states and printed up ballots bearing their names. Probably individuals who might otherwise have identified themselves as Republican presidential elector candidates were intimidated from doing that. Also because voting was not secret in those days, those tickets, if they had been prepared and distributed, would have received very few votes.
Here is the Thomas article, which has a link to the Amar piece.
Slate states in which Lincoln did have presidential elector candidates were Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia.