An earlier blog post today said that a challenge had been filed to the statewide petition of the Pennsylvania Green Party. Since then, the Libertarian and Tea Party statewide petitions have also been challenged. See this story.
Tolerance for minor party and independent candidate election activity in Pennsylvania has drastically declined during the last 70 years. After 1938, and until 2004, no minor party or independent candidate statewide petition was ever challenged in Pennsylvania. But starting in 2004, such challenges have been filed every even-numbered election year in that state. A challenge to Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr was defeated in 2008, but challenges succeeded against Ralph Nader in 2004, and the Green Party statewide slate in 2006.
How nice! Now let’s see if I have this right… if the challenges fail the minor party has to pay the cost of checking the signatures. If the challenges succeed the minor party has to pay the cost of checking the signatures plus the legal fees for the lawyers filing the challenge. Is that right?
You got it Casual! The one who files the petitions, not the challenger, gets to pay all of the costs. Carl Romanelli, who ran for US Senate in 2006, is still fighting the action thru the court system.
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100714/NEWS/7140329/-1/rss01
I’m tempted to challenge every major party petition in PA in 2012
“A challenge to Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr was defeated in 2008,”
It should be pointed out that the challenge to the Libertarian Party’s petitions in Pennsylvania in 2008 was NOT over the signatures themselves, but rather was over candidate substitution for the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. Candidate substitution has been a long accepted practice in Pennsylvania so the challenged failed.
This is the first time that the Libertarian Party’s petition signatures have been challenged in PA.
Wow, PA state workers are going to be pretty busy in the next few months!
Casual, Brian, actually PA law states that an unsuccessful _challenger_ can be saddled with legal fees and court costs. This is usually only applied when a challenge is considered frivolous.
The 2004 Nader case and the 2006 Romanelli case were the first and only cases where a court (miss)interpreted the law to allow for saddling the challengee with such cost, and as statewide cases that involved over 50,000 signatures and almost 100,000 signatures, respectively, the cost were high.
http://www.dos.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/department_of_state/12405
New Objection Filing Requirements Updated July 29, 2010
here is the link to the order by Judge Leadbetter of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court dated July 28, 2010 listing the requirements for filing an Objection to Nomination Papers for Statewide Office. Not sure if this is helpful or hurtful but it is interesting that the Commonwealth Court felt the need to issue this just prior to the August 1 filing deadline. Nomination PAPERS only apply to independent, political body and minor party candidates. I have seen no such order applying to Nomination PETITIONS which apply only to Primary Election candidates, i.e. only Democrats and Republicans.