On July 25, Ralph Nader submitted 7,500 more signatures in West Virginia. He had already submitted 17,000. That first batch has already been checked, and it had a 69% validity rate. Assuming the same validity rate for the recent batch, he will easily meet the requirement of 15,118 valid signatures. Thanks to Glenn Brown for this news. Also on July 25, Nader submitted his Tennessee petition, and had earlier submitted a petition in Washington state, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, all relatively easy states.

Also on July 25, the Washington state Libertarian Party submitted over 2,000 signatures, toward the requirement of 1,000 for placing Bob Barr on the ballot.

On July 22, the Arizona Secretary of State asked the 9th circuit to reconsider its July 9 decision in Nader v Brewer. That decision had struck down both the early June petition deadline for independent presidential candidates, and also the law making it illegal for out-of-staters to circulate petitions in Arizona.

For eight years, the constitutionality of the Post Office regulation prohibiting petitioning on postal interior sidewalks has been pending in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in a case called Initiative & Referendum Institute v US Postal Service. In the meantime, another federal lawsuit challenging the same regulation is pending in the First Circuit. The plaintiff, Reynaldo Del Gallo, is submitting his brief on July 25. He had lost in the U.S. District Court on March 28, 2008, but he was representing himself pro se. Since then, the ACLU has found an expert attorney for his appeal.

Del Gallo was arrested, even though technically he was not petitioning on a postal sidewalk. He was standing on the post office sidewalk, asking passers-by to please visit his petition circulator, standing on a “legal” sidewalk nearby. The Post Office charged him with “electioneering”. The Post Office attorneys did not tell the Massachusetts court that the constitutionality of the anti-petitioning regulation is being litigated in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, and the plaintiff didn’t know about that case.