On June 4, Ralph Nader will be turning in approximately 50,000 signatures to be an independent presidential candidate in Arizona. The requirement is 21,759 signatures. Assuming Nader has enough valid signatures, he will be the first independent presidential candidate to qualify in Arizona in the history of the existing law, which was passed in 1993.

Before 1993, the Arizona independent candidate petition deadline was 10 days after the primary, but signatures could not be gathered until primary day, and only voters who had not voted in the primary could sign. This law was especially tough on Ross Perot in 1992, because he officially wasn’t running for president between mid-July 1992 and October 1, 1992. He really knew he would be getting back in the race, but publicly he wasn’t running. The old Arizona requirement required that all his petitions be gathered during September, which was very awkward. After the 1992 election, Perot supporters and other independent activists successfully lobbied for a change.

Unfortunately, that change turned out to be almost as restrictive as the old law. The new law changed the number of signatures from 1% of the last vote cast, to 3% of the number of registered independents. Whereas the old law had a deadline in late September, the new law had a deadline in June. Whereas the old law said no one could sign who had voted in the primary, the new law said no one could sign who was a registered member of a qualified party.

In 1996, Nader supporters challenged the part of the new law that said only registered members who were not members of a qualified party could sign. That case was won in 1999 (too late for Nader to use in 1996) and is called Campbell v Hull. But even with that improvement, the new Arizona independent candidate law has been an impediment, and all presidential independents who tried to qualify 1996 through 2004 failed, including Nader himself in both 1996 and 2004. Nader’s 2004 lawsuit against the June deadline is still pending in the 9th circuit. The Arizona legislature has made the independent candidate even earlier, on two separate occasions since 1993, so that this year the deadline is June 4. Arizona has the second earliest independent presidential petition deadline of any state (only Texas is earlier).

No one else has turned in signatures to be an independent presidential candidate in Arizona this year. The ballot-qualified parties are the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Green Parties. The Constitution Party tried to qualify but did not succeed.

On May 30, Ralph Nader filed a notice of appeal in his federal lawsuit against Hawaii ballot access law. This is a case filed in 2004. The two issues are whether Hawaii’s petition-checking procedures are constitutional, and whether it is constitutional to force an independent presidential candidate to collect six times as many signatures as are needed for an entire new party with its own primary. The U.S. District Court ruled against Nader on both points earlier this year.

The June 1 Democratic presidential primary in Puerto Rico attracted only 387,299 voters. Puerto Rico has 2,366,667 registered voters. Normally Puerto Rican elections have a higher turnout than a typical U.S. state does. For example, in November 2004, 1,959,108 votes were cast for Puerto Rico’s non-voting Delegate to the U.S. House (Puerto Rico’s Delegate is called Resident Commissioner, and this office is elected every four years; it is not up in mid-term years).

This 16.4% turnout may have been low because Puerto Ricans who support independence promoted a boycott of the primary. On election day, 10,000 Puerto Ricans demonstrated for independence.

Puerto Rico’s Democratic presidential primary in 1980 attracted 886,280 voters. The Puerto Rican elections authorities printed 1,800,000 Democratic ballots for the June 1, 2008 primary, almost five times as many as were needed.

The poor turnout was a setback for Hillary Clinton, who had campaigned much more in Puerto Rico than Barack Obama had. She had been hoping for a massive turnout. Given her 68.4% victory in Puerto Rico, if Puerto Rico had had a huge turnout, she would have then been able to unambiguously say that she had received more popular votes in the whole country that Obama has received in the whole country. But given the low turnout, her margin in Puerto Rico was only 141,662.