New Haven, Connecticut, has partisan city elections. The Democratic primary for Mayor and other city offices is September 12, 2023.
On August 16, a Democratic candidate for Mayor, Shafiq Abdussabur, was told that he didn’t have enough valid signatures. He needed 1,623 and was told he only had 1,406. Many signatures were rejected because they were illegible. However, Abdussabur re-valided enough signatures, using his own volunteers, and filed a lawsuit that same day, trying to show he does have enough valid signatures. Abdussabur v Evans.
The hearing was on August 23. At the hearing, the city clerk argued that the Purcell Principle prohibits the court from putting Abdussabur on the ballot. This is a false argument. “The Purcell Principle” came into being in 2006, when the Ninth Circuit had enjoined Arizona’s voter id procedures, and the U.S. Supreme Court had then quickly stayed the order of the Ninth Circuit on the grounds that voting procedures should not be changed too close to an election. Purcell v Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1.
Now the notion has been spreading that the Purcell Principle means candidates cannot be added to the ballot too close to an election. But voting procedures are a different subject than the list of candidates on the ballot. It is obvious from past U.S. Supreme Court precedent that there is no constitutional principle that keeps candidates who had been unjustly barred from the ballot from seeking last-minute relief. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that George Wallace should stay on the Ohio ballot in October 15, 1968. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court put Eugene McCarthy on the ballot as an independent in Texas on September 30. And most radical of all, in 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court put the Harold Washington Party on the Cook County, Illinois ballot, on October 25, only two weeks before the election.
Here is an article about the New Haven hearing. The ballots have not yet been printed, except for some absentee ballots.
