Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 20:58:45 EDT From: freemanaz@aol.com Subject: [lpaz-discuss] Advisory: Arizona Lawsuit Win To: lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com Reply-To: lpaz-discuss@yahoogroups.com
Subj: Advisory: Arizona Lawsuit Win Date: 5/30/01 3:58:31 PM US Mountain Standard Time From: owner-announce@lp.org (Libertarian Party Announcements) Reply-to: owner-announce@lp.org To: announce@hq.lp.org
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ADVISORY FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY News from the National P headquarters for members & supporters of the Libertarian Party
Watergate Office Building 2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 100 Washington DC 20037 Website: www.LP.org Email: pressreleases@hq.LP.org For information about the party: (800) ELECT-US
May 30, 2001
Libertarian Party wins belated Arizona filing deadline lawsuit
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Libertarian Party has belatedly won a lawsuit acknowledging that Harry Browne was improperly kept off the Arizona ballot as an independent presidential candidate in 2000.
On May 29, the Arizona Court of Appeals struck down as unconstitutional the state's early filing deadline for independent candidates.
The June 14 deadline, which is two months before the state's "major" parties must select candidates, "unfairly and unnecessarily burdens independent candidates," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
"The deadline does impose a suspect burden because it treats independent candidates dissimilarly from the major parties' candidates, thereby substantially impacting the rights of the voter," wrote Judge Rudolph J. Gerber.
With the decision, the court overturned a Maricopa County Superior Court ruling that had upheld the June 14 deadline -- at the time, the second earliest independent candidate filing deadline in the nation -- and had denied Browne a spot on the November 2000 ballot.
Libertarian Party leaders hailed the new ruling as an overdue but important victory for ballot access.
"It would have been nice to have won this decision last year, so Harry Browne could have been on the ballot in all 50 states, instead of 49," said Libertarian Party National Director Steve Dasbach. "However, the ruling is still important because it helps set the legal precedent that early filing deadlines and other forms of ballot access discrimination are improper and illegal."
The case does set an influential legal precedent, agreed Ballot Access News publisher Richard Winger.
"The more precedents we get against early deadlines, the easier it is to stop hostile [ballot access] changes in the future from state legislatures," he said.
The Arizona state legislature will now push back the filing deadline to comply with the ruling, predicted Winger.
The Libertarian Party and Harry Browne had filed a lawsuit against Arizona's filing deadline in August 2000, after Browne was denied a spot on the ballot by a splinter group of the Arizona Libertarian Party.
Browne, the party's official presidential candidate, had been nominated at the Libertarian National Convention in July, and, with VP candidate Art Olivier, was already on the ballot in 49 other states and the District of Columbia.
But the maverick Arizona group placed Colorado science fiction author L. Neil Smith on the ballot as the LP candidate for president, and Nevada newspaper columnist Vin Suprynowicz on as vice president.
In response, the party decided to qualify Browne for the Arizona ballot as an independent candidate for president. In a whirlwind petition drive, the party collected more than 22,000 signatures at a cost of about $65,000 and filed them on August 17.
Since state law required independent ballot petitions to be turned in by June 14, the party filed a lawsuit to overturn the deadline.
At the time, said Dasbach, "We were fairly confident we would win, since every prior court ruling has held that such early filing deadlines are unconstitutional. No court ruling had ever upheld a June filing deadline for independent presidential petitions."
Despite that confidence, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled against the party, and the U.S. District Court in Phoenix refused to overturn the decision.
However, in its May 29 ruling, the Arizona Court of Appeals rejected the Superior Court's legal reasoning, ruling that the state had no compelling interest to set the deadline for independent candidates so early.
The case was Browne vs. Bayless. (Betsy Bayless is the Secretary of State for Arizona.)
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