The Unity Party, which attained qualified status in Florida earlier in 2021, has voluntarily removed itself from qualified status in Florida. The demands of filing several complicated campaign finance reports several times a year was judged by the party to not be worth the benefits of being on the ballot.
On October 5, the Eighth Circuit refused to rehear Eggers v Evnen, 22-2268. This is the Nebraska case on statewide initiative petitions. The state has a county distribution requirement, and the Eighth Circuit had upheld it last month. The vote had been 2-1. This case will probably be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit has repeatedly struck down county distribution requirements for statewide initiatives, so there is a clear circuit split.
The basis for decisions that have struck down county distribution requirements for various types of statewide petitions is that because counties have unequal populations, these requirements invariably give more power to voters living in small-population counties than in populous counties.
An official of the Oregon Republican Party has charged that when Green Party gubernatorial nominee Nathalie Paravicini withdrew from the November 2022 ballot, she broke the law. See this story.
Federal voting rights laws have long held that voters cannot be disenfranchised for making a mistake that is not “material”. In other words, if the error made by the voter is merely technical and does not truly pertain to that voter’s ability to cast a vote, the error should not be used to discard the ballot.
On May 27, 2022, the Third Circuit had used that provision of federal law to allow some ballots to be counted in a Pennsylvania local race held in 2021. Even though certain mail-in ballots did not have the “date” blank filled in by the voter, the Court ruled that the ballots should count. All the arriving ballots had been date-stamped by the receiving election office, so the Third Circuit reasoned that it didn’t really make any difference if the voter had also written in the date the ballot had been mailed.
On June 9, the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to stay the Third Circuit decision, by a vote of 6-3. The dissenters were Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas. But on October 11, the U.S. Supreme Court acted in the case again, ruling that the case is moot and therefore the Third Circuit decision is to be vacated, which is another word for “erased.” So although there is no effect on the 2021 Pennsylvania local election, the precedent is eliminated and the matter will need to be re-adjudicated in the future, because it is bound to recur. The vote on October 11 is 7-2, with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson dissenting. The case is Ritter v Migliori, 22-30.
North Carolina released new registration totals on October 10. For the first time, North Carolina Libertarian registration is above 50,000. The only other state in which the Libertarian Party ever exceeded 50,000 registered voters has been California.
Here are the new totals. The Green Party only has 128 registrants, but that is because when it went off the ballot in November 2020, the state converted all its registrations to independents. When the Green Party got back on the ballot a few months ago, it had to start from zero.
The only other state in which Libertarian registration ever approached 50,000 was Pennsylvania, which had 48,966 at its peak in October 2016. The Pennsylvania voter registration form stopped showing the Libertarian choice after the November 2018 election. Although the state did not disturb the registration status of the Libertarians at that time, the absence from the party as a choice on the form diminished its registration somewhat, and it has about 45,000 currently.
