The first week in August, the New Jersey Green, Libertarian and Conservative Parties will file a constitutional lawsuit in state court. The lawsuit will challenge a law that makes it illegal for petitioners to circulate a petition for a candidate for district or county office, if the petitioners don’t live in that district or county.

The lawsuit will also challenge the failure of New Jersey elections officials to tally how many voters register as members of the Conservative Party (the other parties in the lawsuit already won that right years ago, but the state won’t extend that right to any parties other than the ones that won the old registration lawsuit in 1999).

Finally, the lawsuit will challenge election laws that make it easier for the Republican and Democratic Parties to raise and spend money, than any other parties; and the make it easier for the two major parties to lobby the legislature, than for other parties to do so.

Alabama lets the two major parties have extraordinary power over whether to let members of those parties onto primary ballots or not. State law lets the major parties exclude candidates who have been “disloyal” (i.e., anyone who ran as a write-in candidate, or as an independent, or as a member of another party, during the preceding four years). At least 4 such individuals were blocked from 2004 primaries.

On July 12, the Alabama Supreme Court refused to hear another of these lawsuits, filed by an excluded candidate. The lower court had refused to put Steve Small on the Democratic Party ballot as a candidate for Jefferson County Commission, because 4 years ago he had run as a write-in candidate for the same office in the general election. Small v Turnham, 1051061. The Court said the case is moot because the primary was already held. Small had charged that the Democratic Party does not enforce its rule uniformly. Alabama doesn’t have a procedure for a write-in candidate to file as a “declared” write-in candidate anyway; there is no official record that Small ran as a write-in in 2002.

Last week, Nebraska voters who desire to cast a write-in vote for Tom Osborne for Governor this November filed a lawsuit against the state’s “sore loser” law for write-in candidates. Rodgers v Heineman, 33-06-0018.

Tom Osborne lost the Republican primary for Governor last May, but some of his die-hard supporters still want to organize a write-in campaign for him in November (even though Osborne himself says he isn’t interested). Nebraska law requires write-in candidates to file a declaration of write-in candidacy if they want their write-ins counted, and also bars individuals who lost a partisan primary from filing such a write-in declaration.

However, in 1912, the Nebraska Supreme Court said, “The right of the voter to vote at the general election for whom he pleases cannot be limited”, and no subsequent decision of that court has reversed that ruling.