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.

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.