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.

On February 12, U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi refused to stay his own opinion in No Labels Party v Fontes, 2:23cv-2172. Now the state of Arizona can ask the Ninth Circuit for a stay. The U.S. District Court had sided with No Labels in his earlier opinion. He had upheld the freedom of association right of No Labels to block anyone from running in the party’s primary for congress or state office.

On February 12, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., filed a federal lawsuit against the March 15 Idaho petition deadline for independent presidential candidates. The lawsuit also challenges the requirement that the petition circulators must sign an affidavit that they are Idaho residents. And, it challenges the need for the petition to bear the name of a vice-presidential nominee. Team Kennedy v McGrane, 1:24cv-00083.

Idaho lost a lawsuit over the residency requirement for circulators in 2010, but the form still says the circulators must sign an oath that they live in Idaho.

The petition deadline was in August until a few years ago, when the legislature irrationally repealed the section of the law that covers independent presidential candidates. The Secretary of State therefore interprets the law to have a March deadline, because that is the deadline for non-presidential independent candidates. For a while the Secretary of State was in doubt about what the deadline was, but now he says it is in March.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1983 struck down early deadlines for independent presidential candidates.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill, a Clinton appointee. In 2020 he granted ballot access relief to proponents of an initiative, due to the covid crisis.