U.S. District Court Judge Robert Echols has set a hearing date of October 10, in Kurita v The State Primary Board of the Tennessee Democratic Party. This is the case that challenges the decision of the Democratic Party not to recognize Rosalind Kurita as their nominee for State Senate, even though she won the August Democratic primary. The party decertified her because it said too many Republicans voted in the Democratic primary.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Echols has set a hearing date of October 10, in Kurita v The State Primary Board of the Tennessee Democratic Party. This is the case that challenges the decision of the Democratic Party not to recognize Rosalind Kurita as their nominee for State Senate, even though she won the August Democratic primary. The party decertified her because it said too many Republicans voted in the Democratic primary.
On October 1, the Connecticut Libertarian Party filed a federal lawsuit to get Bob Barr on the ballot. Libertarian Party of Connecticut v Bysiewicz, 3:08cv-1513. The case is assigned to Judge Janet Hall, a Clinton appointee.
The state believes that the Libertarian presidential petition was 280 signatures short, but Libertarian volunteers have found 209 signatures that were erroneously invalidated. The volunteers haven’t finished re-checking all of the rejected signatures. The lawsuit evidence will include evidence of the revalidation work performed so far. The party also believes that while the petition sheets were in the custody of elections officials, 116 petition sheets were lost.
The November 2008 Colorado ballot will list 16 presidential candidates. This is the most crowded ballot in U.S. history for president at a general election. The previous record was 14, set in 1992 in three states (Iowa, Tennessee, and Wisconsin).
This year, it appeared that 18 candidates would be on in Colorado. However, two candidates who filed by the June 17 deadline did not complete the filing. The law does not require the candidates for presidential elector to be submitted on June 17. Elvena Lloyd-Duffie of Chicago, and William R. Koenig of Alexandria, Virginia, did not submit candidates for presidential elector. Koenig decided not to submit any candidates for elector because he decided that he supports John McCain for president. His original ballot label had been “unaffiliated”. It is not known why Elvena Lloyd-Duffie did not complete her filing. Since she had chosen the ballot label “Republican”, even if she had completed her filing, the Secretary of State would have required a different label.
The sixteen candidates who are on are the nominees of the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Socialist, Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Workers, Prohibition, America’s Independent, Boston Tea, Objectivist, Pacifist, and Heartquake Parties. Two independent candidates on are Ralph Nader and Frank McEnulty; their label is “unaffiliated.”
On October 1, the 7th circuit upheld the number of signatures needed for an independent candidate for U.S. House in Illinois. Stevo v Keith, 08-3218. The opinion is only six pages long and was written by Judge Richard Posner and co-signed by Judges Joel Flaum and Richard Cudahy. The opinion ignores all the evidence and all the favorable precedents. Instead, it merely says since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld 5% petitions in Jenness v Fortson, the Illinois law is constitutional. Here is the opinion.
Illinois only requires 5,000 signatures in years that end in “2”. The evidence showed that in the 61 U.S. House elections in which the 5,000 signature requirement was in effect, not a single independent candidate ever qualified for U.S. House. Therefore, logic seems to say that the state has no interest in requiring 10,000 or more signatures in other years. The opinion does not mention this evidence. Nor dies it mention the U.S. Supreme Court admonition in Storer v Brown that “there is no litmus test” for determining whether a ballot access law is constitutional, but that lower courts should analyze how many times the law is used. Nor does the opinion mention the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision Illinois State Board of Elections v Socialist Workers Party, which struck down the 5% formula in Illinois in jurisdictions in which applying the 5% formula would result in requiring more signatures for a district office than for a statewide office. The message of Illinois State Board of Elections v Socialist Workers Party is that judges should use common sense. That was not done in the Stevo decision.
The decision says that there is one U.S. House district in which the 5% formula yields fewer signatures than 5,000, and suggests that if the 5,000 formula used in years like 1992 and 2002 were used in all cases, independents in that one district would be injured. But the state is free to require 5,000 signatures or 5% of the last vote cast. For statewide petitions, the law requires 25,000 or 1% of the last vote cast. The decision does not mention the statewide formula, even though applying the statewide idea would solve the so-called problem set forth by the decision.
