On August 29, a Connecticut state court ruled against Shafiq Abdussabur, a candidate for Mayor of New Haven who wanted to be on the September primary ballot. Abdussabur v Evans, New Haven Superior Court, NH-cv-23-6135336. His petition was rejected for not having enough signatures. The very day he was ruled off the ballot, he filed a lawsuit and evidence that his petition did have enough valid signatures.

The city still kept him off the ballot on the grounds that absentee voting had already started. The judge upheld that decision, citing the “Purcell Principle.” The U.S. Supreme Court had invented this principle in 2006, in a case that hadn’t even been briefed or argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. The “Purcell Principle” said election procedures cannot be changed too soon before an election. Now this Connecticut court has expanded the principle to include correcting errors in the list of candidates who should be on the ballot. This completely contradicts the history of past U.S. Supreme Court intervention in adding candidates to the ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court kept George Wallace on the Ohio ballot in 1968 in October 15; added independent presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy to the Texas ballot in 1976 on September 30; and put the Harold Washington Party on the Cook County, Illinois ballot in 1992 on October 25, only two weeks before the general election.

Here is the Connecticut decision.

Here is the story from The Hill.

On Wednesday, August 30, the Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee will hear SB 224, which would move the 2024 primary for all office from late April to March 19. If the bill passes, it will have no effect on the petition deadline for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties.

If the bill passes, Democratic and Republican candidates would need to be circulating primary petitions to get on the ballot in the days before Christmas. But if the bill doesn’t pass, the 2024 primary interferes with Passover. It doesn’t seem to occur to Pennsylvania legislators that they are free to abolish primary petitions. A majority of states do not require primary petitions; instead, they depend on filing fees to keep primary ballots from being too crowded.