Alaska lets candidates file for primaries very early. Already two candidates have paid the filing fee and completed the paperwork to be listed on the August 20, 2024 primary ballot for U.S. House. See them listed here on the Alaska Elections Division’s website.

One of the two early filers is Richard Grayson, whose ballot label will be “No Labels.” He is almost certainly the first candidate in any state who has already qualified to be on a 2024 ballot using that label. In Alaska, there are no party nominees, except presidential electors in the general election, so it would not be accurate to say that Grayson is the No Labels nominee. Grayson will not appear on the November 2024 ballot for U.S. House in Alaska unless he places in the top four in August.

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.

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.