The American Independent Party state convention in California this year is set for June 6-8, in Sacramento, at a Denny’s Restaurant at 9256 3rd Street. This convention will choose presidential elector candidates. It is likely to receive a large attendance, because the state chair, Ed Noonan, apparently wants to nominate candidates pledged to Alan Keyes for president. This would effectively sever the American Independent Party of California from its status as the California affiliate of the Constitution Party, since the Constitution Party recently chose Chuck Baldwin as its presidential candidate.

The AIP state central committee will make the decision. The room reserved for the convention only holds 25 people. It is likely that the convention will need to move to a different location, since this meeting will attract a very large number of people. The AIP state central committee, according to the California election law, is not comprised of county central committee members of that party. Instead, the AIP state central committee is composed of the party’s candidates for partisan public office at the last election, and their appointees. The existing state central committee can appoint members (if the county central committee is not organized in that county) for all the partisan offices for which the party had no candidates in the last election.

On May 1, U.S. District Court Judge Alan Kay, a Reagan appointee, upheld Hawaii’s petition-checking procedures. The Hawaii Supreme Court had also upheld them, on March 27. The federal case is called Nader v Cronin, 04-611, and had been filed by Ralph Nader and Michael Peroutka in 2004, after the state had disqualified approximately half of the signatures on their independent presidential petitions.

Judge Kay cited the US Supreme Court decision of April 28, 2008, on the Indiana photo ID-law for voting at the polls. He said, “Recently, the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional an Indiana law requiring government issued photo identification to vote. See Crawford, 2008 WL 1848103. In this case, the petition form simply required signatories to properly provide information requested on the information form. The requirements in this case are far less cumbersome than those in Crawford…The Supreme Court has noted the prevalence of fraudulent voting throughout this Nation’s history. Moreover, the court in Crawford explained that while no evidence of actual voter fraud had been shown in that case, the threat of voter fraud was real and the state’s interest in preventing it was ‘a neutral and nondiscriminatory reason supporting the State’s decision to require photo identification.”

Hawaii is the only state that requires the last 4 digits of the signer’s Social Security Number on the petition (if the SS number is not provided, then the signer must provide his or her full birthdate). Ironically, Hawaii’s policy on Social Security numbers or birthdates facilitates, or could facilitate, identity theft. So Judge Kay has upheld a state policy that encourages identity theft, and justified it under “preventing fraud.” Judge Kay’s opinion is also faulty for not acknowledging that the U.S. Supreme Court only upheld the Indiana law on its face, in a case that had no disadvantaged voter-plaintiffs, and had said that a new case can be filed by such a voter-plaintiff.

This Hawaii federal case will be appealed to the 9th circuit, not only on the issue of the petition-checking procedures, but on the issue decided earlier by Judge Kay, that it is constitutional for a state to require six times as many signatures for a single independent candidate as for an entire new party.