On Monday, January 8, 2024, US District Court Judge Donald Nugent (Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division) ruled that Ohio’s voter identification laws do not severely burden Ohio’s voters and upheld their constitutionality.
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Kennebec County Superior Court Judge Michaela Murphy has set oral arguments for Wednesday, January 17, in Trump v Bellows, augsc-at-24-01. However, former President Donald Trump filed a request on January 8 to postpone the argument until after the U.S. Supreme Court hears the somewhat similar Colorado case.
Maine’s Secretary of State, and the voters who challenged Trump in Maine, oppose the request to postpone the argument.
All qualified parties in Maine nominate by primary, and all qualified parties are entitled to a presidential primary. But No Labels Party doesn’t want its own presidential primary, so the state won’t hold one. See this story.
Filing for the Illinois primaries closed on January 5. For president in the Republican primary, the only candidates who filed are Ryan Binkley, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump. Candidates need 3,000 signatures. Vivek Ramaswamy did not file.
Democrats who filed are Joe Biden, Frankie Lozada, Dean Phillips, and Marianne Williamson.
No presidential petition was challenged except for Trump’s petition. Objectors do not challenge the number of signatures he filed. But they challenge him because he did not sign the loyalty oath, which says that candidates are not affiliated with a Communist organization and that they will not work to overthrown the government. That oath has been declared unconstitutional many times in the past but it remains in the Illinois election code.
On January 8, newly-elected Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, called a special session of the new legislature for January 15-23. Here is his agenda for that special session.
Item 9 mentions candidate filing fees for president and congress. That probably means he wants the legislature to increase them. Currently any independent presidential candidate can get on the November ballot with a filing fee of $500, plus a slate of presidential electors with one from each U.S. House district. The presidential primary filing fee is also $500.
In November 2020, there were twelve presidential candidates on the ballot, more than any other state that year except for Vermont. It may be that the Governor thinks there were too many candidates on the ballot.
The agenda does not call for making it more difficult for parties to attain qualified status. Currently the law requires 1,000 registered voters to be a qualified party.
The Governor also wants to restore the ability of parties to have nominees. Currently Louisiana has no primaries (except for presidential primaries). It only has general elections, and if no one gets 50%, it has run-off elections a few weeks after the general election. See items seven and eleven on the agenda.