On May 30, the Arkansas Green Party submitted 18,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office, to qualify for party status. The statutory law requires slightly over 24,000 signatures. However, that law was declared unconstitutional in 1996. Arkansas appealed the 1996 ruling, but then dropped its own appeal, and now tries to pretend that the 1996 ruling doesn’t exist. The Associated Press reporter who covered this story doesn’t seem to know about the 1996 ruling, which is called Citizens to Establish a Reform Party v Priest, 970 F Supp 690. That decision said it is unconstitutional for Arkansas to require more than 10,000 signatures for a new party, since Arkansas requires that many signatures for statewide non-presidential independent candidates.

On May 30, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson, a Carter appointee, upheld Alabama’s June 6 petition deadline for minor parties and non-presidential independents. Swanson v Worley, 2:02cv644-T.

The decision is only 7 pages long, and doesn’t even mention the two U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the issue of petition deadlines, Mandel v Bradley, and Anderson v Celebrezze. Mandel v Bradley, issued in 1977 by the U.S. Supreme Court, said that early petition deadlines are unconstitutional if the record shows that very few minor parties or independents ever qualify. Thompson ignored the record, which showed that few such candidates have qualified in Alabama ever since the deadline was moved from mid-July to early June, in 2002.

Plaintiffs can now appeal this case, which was filed in 2002, to the 11th circuit.

On May 30, the California Assembly passed AB 2948, by a vote of 42-25. AB 2948 is the bill being introduced around the U.S., in various state legislatures, that sets up an interstate compact. The compact would only go into effect after states containing a majority of electoral votes had joined. After that, states in the compact would appoint presidential electors pledged to the winner of the national popular vote. The authority for a state to do that is in Article II, sec. 1, which says, “Each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors”.