PHOENIX — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld an Arizona law requiring minor parties to qualify for the ballot at least six months before the primary if they hope to run any candidates.
In a unanimous ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rebuffed claims by the Arizona Green Party that a February deadline to submit petitions is unconstitutional. Judge Margaret McKeown said attorneys for the party never demonstrated any significant burden on its rights.
Conversely, McKeown said the deadline “served Arizona’s important interest in administering orderly elections.”
There was no immediate response from Claudia Ellquist, co-chair of the party, who was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The legal dispute stems from state election laws spelling out how parties get a space on the ballot for their candidates.
Any party that gets at least 5 percent of the vote in the prior election is automatically qualified. So are those who have a certain number of people registered with the party.
The Green Party met neither burden for the 2014 election.
There is another option: Collect petitions signed by at least 1.33 percent of the total votes cast for governor in the last general election, a figure that translated out to 23,401 signatures. But the law requires they be turned in 180 days before the primary, a deadline that fell Feb. 27.
Attorneys for the party filed suit, saying that date is “one of the earliest deadlines in the country.” They also noted that until 2000, the deadline was in May.
“The early deadline is unduly burdensome and invidiously discriminatory and not designed to allow a reasonable diligent minor party organization to qualify for the ballot,” wrote attorney Robert Barnes for the party. But McKeown said there was something missing in all that: evidence.
“For example, we do not know how difficult it was for the Green Party to collect the required signatures, how much the signature-gathering effort cost (and), whether petition efforts diverted the party’s resources from other endeavors,” she wrote.
McKeown also said the party never backed up its claim that voters are not focused on the election at the time of the February deadline or even whether the party had in fact tried to comply with the earlier deadline.
“Without any evidence regarding the practical consequences of the deadline, we find ourselves in the position of Lady Justice: blindfolded and stuck holding empty scales,” she wrote, citing earlier 9th Circuit rulings upholding various election laws and deadlines. What that leaves, McKeown said, are the claims by state election officials that they need the time.
