The California petition requirement for independent presidential candidates in 2024 will be 219,403 signatures, unless the law is changed. No independent candidate in U.S. history has ever overcome an independent petition requirement as high as that.

The requirement is 1% of the number of registered voters as of the October 24, 2022 registration total.

California only allows 105 days to collect these signatures. By contrast, California allows unlimited time for either a petition drive, or a registration drive, to qualify a new party. No one has overcome the independent petition requirement in California since 1992.

The petition must contain the names and addresses of 54 presidential elector candidates, which takes up a lot of room on the petition form, and which makes it impossible to circulate the petition until the presidential candidate has chosen his or her elector candidates.

I have asked my State Senator, Scott Wiener, to introduce a bill in 2023 to ease the procedure, but so far he has not responded.

The Florida Secretary of State has posted new registration data. See it here.

On November 4, some Pennsylvania voting rights groups filed a new lawsuit over the issue of undated postal ballots. Although the State Supreme Court recently ruled that state law requires that undated postal ballots must not be counted, the issue of whether federal law requires a different result is still undecided. The case against the date requirement is the federal civil rights “materiality” law, which says that votes cannot be disqualified for reasons that are not material to whether the vote is an honest ballot.

The Pennsylvania law seems meaningless because all returned postal ballots are date-stamped by the elections office when they are received.

The new case is Pennsylvania State Conference of NAACP v Chapman, w.d., 1:22cv-339. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Susan P. Baxter, a Trump appointee. Here is the Complaint. Thanks to Democracy Docket for the link. This case will move very fast.