On December 21, a Maine state trial court upheld the decision of the Secretary of State that the petition to put Chris Christie on the Republican presidential primary ballot is invalid. Christie submitted 6,000 signatures to meet a requirement of 2,000, but he didn’t segregate them by towns. See this story. Thanks to Michael Drucker for this news.
UPDATE: this story is more detailed.
On December 21, U.S. District Court Judge Irene C. Berger, an Obama appointee, issued an opinion in Castro v Warner, s.d., 2:23cv-598. This is John Anthony Castro’s lawsuit to keep former President Donald Trump off the West Virginia Republican presidential primary ballot. The 14-page decision says that Castro lacks standing.
The decision has a list of the other similar cases that Castro has lost.
On December 22, the Arizona Secretary of State determined that the petition to qualify the Green Party is valid. The party needed 34,127 valid signatures, and it submitted 63,000. There were 45,127 valid signatures, for a validity rate of 72%. Thanks to Richard Grayson for this news.
The last time the Arizona Green Party successfully completed the petition was in 2014, but the 2014 petition wasn’t submitted by the deadline, so that petition was instead used to put the party on the ballot for 2016 and 2018. The party did not appear on the Arizona ballot in either 2020 nor 2022.
On December 22, the Vermont Secretary of State released a list of candidates who qualified for the Democratic presidential primary, and the Republican presidential primary. There are six candidates on each ballot. Candidates qualified by submitting 500 signatures. The Secretary of State’s office issued a statement saying the office does not have the authority to adjudicate qualifications, and former President Donald Trump is on the Republican list. Thanks to William Stevenson for the link.
Some defenders of the Colorado decision Anderson v Griswold say that the ruling doesn’t injure the right to vote, because any voter is still free to cast a write-in for Donald Trump; it’s just that the write-in can’t be counted.
But the U.S. Supreme Court in the past has said that the Fourteenth Amendment requires that all voters be treated equally, and that the right to vote includes the right to have the vote counted. In Gray v Sanders, 372 US 368, at page 380, the Court wrote, “The Court has consistently recognized that all qualified voters have a constitutionally protected right to ‘cast their ballots and have them counted at congressional elections’ United Sttes v Classic, 313 US 299 at 315; see Ex Parte Yarbrough, 110 US 651; Wiley v Sinkler, 179 US 58; Swafford v Templeton, 185 US 487. Every voter’s vote is entitled to be counted once. It must be correctly counted and reported. As stated in United States v Mosley, 238 US 383 at 386, ‘the right to have one’s vote counted’ has the same dignity as ‘the right to put a ballot in a box.'”
Justice William O. Douglas wrote in South v Peters, 339 US 276, at 279, “There is more to the right to vote than the right to mark a piece of paper and drop it into a box or the right to pull a lever in a voting booth. The right to vote includes the right to have the ballot counted.”
