The Louisiana presidential ballot access case will have a hearing Monday, September 22, at 10 a.m., in U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The case was filed by the Libertarian Party, and the Socialist Party. The hearing on September 16 had just been a status conference. The case is Libertarian Party et al v Dardenne, no. cv-08-582. The case is assigned to Judge James Brady, a Clinton appointee.
The Mississippi Supreme Court holds oral arguments in Berger v Barbour at 11:30 a.m. on September 17 (Wednesday). This is the case on whether the Class I U.S. Senate seat should be at the bottom of the ballot, or whether it should be near the top, next to the Class II U.S. Senate race and just below the presidential part of the ballot.
The Class I U.S. Senate is very close. Democrats charge that the Governor wants that race at the end of the ballot, hoping that many voters will not see it.
The Connecticut Working Families Party, together with the Connecticut Independent Party, are jointly running Cicero B. Booker for State Senate, 15th district. Connecticut permits fusion. Booker’s only opponent is the incumbent Democrat, Senator Joan Hartley. No Republican is running.
Booker is a former member of the State Parole Board, and currently an alderman in Waterbury. He was elected alderman on the Independent Party line. He is close to qualifying for full public funding. If he succeeds, he will receive approximately $100,000 in public funding.
On September 16, Bob Barr and Wayne A. Root asked the Supreme Court of Texas to rule that the Texas Secretary of State had no authority to certify the Democratic and Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees for the ballot. As is fairly well-known, the Texas law requires qualified parties to certify their national nominees by 5 p.m. of the 70th day before the general election, which was August 26. UPDATE: here is the text (preliminary non-text portions are not included).
Of course, the reason the major parties were late was because both of them held their national nominating conventions later than the deadline. The Democratic National Convention was underway when the deadline passed, but the party had not yet nominated Obama and Biden. The Republican National Convention was entirely beyond the deadline.
The petition for a writ of mandamus is quite poetic, quoting the famous passage from “A Man for All Seasons”: “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?…And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?…This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–Man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
There are Texas Supreme Court decisions that have put candidates on the ballot even though deadlines were not met, but they involved errors by party officials. In this case, party officials made no errors; they were simply unable to comply with the law. Lenora Fulani had filed a similar lawsuit in Indiana in 1988, since both the Democratic and Republican Parties had failed to file timely. In Fulani v Hogsett, the 7th circuit ruled that, since she was also listed on the ballot, she had standing to sue; but that she filed her lawsuit eleven weeks after the deadline had been missed, so was guilty of laches.
On September 16, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that John McCain is a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president. He also ruled that, even if he weren’t, the plaintiffs in Robinson v Bowen (08-cv-3836) did not have standing to challenge McCain’s ballot status. He said another presidential candidate running against McCain would have standing, but that even then, the case would only be ripe after the November election. The judge was aware that the California Supreme Court had ruled in 1968 that presidential candidates who are not eligible should not be on the ballot, but he didn’t discuss that in his 5-page opinion.
The plaintiffs in this case are supporters of Alan Keyes, so it is odd that Keyes did not join the case as a co-plaintiff. The plaintiff is a presidential elector candidate for Keyes, and he is also the (somewhat disputed) state chair of the American Independent Party of California.
