U.S. District Court Judge Joseph LaPlante, a Bush Jr. appointee, will hold an evidentiary hearing in Castro v New Hampshire Secretary of State, 1:23cv-416, on October 20. This is a lawsuit in which the plaintiff hopes to keep former President Donald Trump off New Hampshire ballots. The case was filed on September 11.
On September 20, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Watters declined to grant injunctive relief to John Anthony Castro, who wants to bar former President Donald Trump from the Montana ballot, because he has not served notice of his lawsuit on Trump. See her 3-page order here.
Castro, who has many similar lawsuits in different states, has already complained that whenever anyone tries to serve papers at the Trump residence, the papers are refused.
As already noted, on September 12 some Minnesota voters filed a lawsuit in the State Supreme Court to keep former President Donald Trump off the Minnesota Republican presidential primary ballot and the general election ballot. The Defendant is Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat.
On September 27, the Secretary filed a brief in the court, saying he is neutral, but that he hopes for a decision by January 5, 2024. Here is his brief. Growe v Simon, A23-1354.
Some groups and law professors have already asked the court to let them file amicus briefs. The law professors are Derek T. Muller, Bruce Ackerman, and Gerard Magliocca. Their requests do not indicate which side they are on.
Groups that want to file amici briefs are the Republican National Committee and the American Center for Law and Justice, in support of Trump; and the Constitutional Accountability Center, in opposition to Trump.
On September 27, U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May dismissed Cowen v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-4660. This is the lawsuit filed in 2017 by the Georgia Libertarian Party against the 5% petition requirement for U.S. House candidates who are not nominees of a party that had polled 20% of the vote in the last election. The petition is so severe, no party has ever managed to complete it, even though it has existed for 80 years.
The Eleventh Circuit had upheld the law in 2022, but the Eleventh Circuit had seemed to leave an opening to attack the law on Equal Protection grounds. The case returned to U.S. District Court. But now Judge May has decided that the Eleventh Circuit had even foreclosed an Equal Protection argument. Here is her 13-page order.
The only justification for the law that the Eleventh Circuit had mentioned in its 2022 order was the “compelling interest” a state has to keep candidates off the ballot if they don’t have a “modicum of support.” The Eleventh Circuit did not elaborate on that point. If this argument were true, every state in the nation would have a “compelling” reason to ban all candidates from all ballots who weren’t capable of completing a petition signed by 5% of the registered voters in that jurisdiction. This is truly absurd. No candidate for any statewide race, or any U.S. House race, in the last fifty years in any state, has managed to complete a petition of 5% of the registered voters.
On September 7, the California legislature passed AB 1227, which lets Santa Clara County, the most populous county in northern California, use ranked choice voting for elections for county officers. It will be fascinating to see if Governor Gavin Newsom signs this bill. He is believed to be opposed to rank choice voting, and he has consistently vetoed bills to let all non-charter cities use ranked choice voting.
