The New Jersey lawsuit filed by several minor parties on October 13, 2006 has moved slowly. The parties have given the state an extension until the first week in February 2007 to answer their complaint. The lawsuit complains about these problems: (1) the state has not fully implemented the 2001 decision on letting voters register into unqualified parties; (2) qualified parties, which means only the Democratic and Republican Parties, can receive higher contributions than other parties; (3) qualified parties can make unlimited donations to their nominees, while other parties can’t; (4) qualified parties are exempt from lobbying fees, whereas other parties aren’t; (5) members of qualified parties can circulate petitions to get themselves on the primary ballot whether they live in that district or not, but members of unqualified parties cannot circulate a petition outside their home district (if the petition is for district office). The case is called Green Party of N.J. et al v State, no. MER-C-125-06.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear both election law cases that had been on its January 5 conference. They are Nader v Seroty and Wexler v Anderson. See post below (2 posts down) to know what these cases were about.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on the afternoon of Friday, January 5, that it had agreed to hear 7 particular cases. None of these 7 cases is an election law case. The U.S. Supreme Court won’t say until the morning of January 8 what it has done about the other cases that were on conference on January 5. But from experience, we know that they will either deny them, or delay them, or else tell the opposition to file a response brief.

Two election law cases were on conference on January 5: Wexler v Anderson, and Nader v Seroty. In both those cases, the opposition hadn’t even bothered to file a response brief. Therefore, the news on January 8 for these two cases will be one of these three choices: (1) denied; (2) delayed for the Court to think about it some more; or (3) an order telling the opposition side to file a response.

Wexler v Anderson is on whether there is any constitutional protection against vote-counting machines that don’t leave a paper trail. Nader v Seroty is on whether a state can charge a candidate a very large amount of money to cover costs of removing him or her from the ballot, a practice that seems to conflict with older US Supreme Court opinions outlawing poll taxes and mandatory filing fees.

In the case of the 7 (non-election) cases that the Supreme Court did accept on January 5, in all 7 instances, both sides had filed briefs. It is rare for the Court to take a case when it hasn’t yet heard from both sides.