Ohio holds a special election for Attorney General in November 2008. Independent candidates must file 750 valid signatures by May 27 (Tuesday). Any resident of Ohio who is a U.S. citizen age 18 or over may qualify. Candidates need not be attorneys.

The Republican and Democratic Parties will nominate for this office by party meeting. There is no primary for them, for this office, since this year’s primary was already held, back in March 2008. There is no procedure for a new or previously unqualified party to name a nominee (other than using the independent petition, which doesn’t permit a partisan label on the ballot).

On May 19, the New Hampshire Supreme Court said a bill letting underage citizens vote in primaries, if those voters were going to be age 18 by the time of the general election, would violate the State Constitution. New Hampshire is one of the few states in which the State Supreme Court is entitled to decide whether a bill is constitutional or not, before it has become law. Here is the opinion. The case is called Opinion of the Justices, Voting Age in Primaries, 2008-292. The bill, SB 436, had already passed in the Senate, and the House had requested the ruling.

The State Constitution says, “All elections are to be free, and every inhabitant of the state 18 years of age and upwards shall have an equal right to vote in any election.”

On May 19, the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters filed a federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The complaint can be seen here. It alleges that justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court entered into secret meetings with legislative leaders, bargaining with those leaders to increase judicial pay. In exchange, the justices were to decide the outcome of certain pending cases in a way that would be pleasing to legislative leaders. Thanks to Howard Bashman’s How Appealing for this news.

Both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the Pennsylvania legislature, have been resolutely hostile to minor party and independent candidate ballot access, for decades, but especially in this decade.