A New Haven state legislative candidate has joined a legal effort to allow candidates petitioning for election ballots this year to obtain signatures electronically — and get more time to collect fewer names.
The candidate, Jason Bartlett, is seeking to challenge incumbent New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield in an Aug. 11 Democratic primary.
Bartlett has signed onto a class action suit seeking to have a federal judge declare existing petitioning and absentee-voting rules unconstitutional, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an affidavit (read it here), Bartlett states that he doesn’t expect to be able to win enough delegate support at a May 19 convention to qualify for the primary ballot. So under normal rules, he would need to collect signatures from 5 percent of the district’s registered Democrats within a 14-day period to qualify.
The suit he joined was filed by a former State Senate candidate from Guilford named Andy Gottlieb and his former treasurer, Lorna Chand. They claim that current state petitioning and absentee ballot rules violate their 1st and 14th Amendment speech, petitioning, and free association rights. Especially given the Covid-19 public health crisis and the governor’s emergency restrictions, it’s basically impossible to collect the needed signatures by hand, they argue. And the rules limiting who can vote by absentee ballot are too confusing to figure out — and present people with the choice between endangering their health and exercising their right to vote.
Their attorney, Alex Taubes, amended their complaint after Bartlett joined the suit. Taubes said Friday he had planned to file the amended complaint in federal court Friday. But then he heard from the state attorney general’s office, which represents the named defendants (Gov. Ned Lamont and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill). The two sides agreed to speak on Monday to see if they can negotiate a settlement without having the case proceed to a hearing.
Read Taubes’ amended complaint here. (In a separate capacity, Taubes is seeking to challenge incumbent New Haven State Sen. Martin Looney in a Democratic primary. He is not a named plaintiff in this suit.)
The suit seeks, among other requests, to allow petitioners to gather signatures electronically, rather than door to door, through a form to be created by the secretary of the state; to extend the deadline for gathering the signatures from June 9 to July 15; and to lower the threshold by 80 percent.
The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall, who is overseeing a similar case filed by the Libertarian Party seeking to change ballot-access rules for the November general election.
The attorney general’s office had no comment Friday on the cases.
“Because incumbents have a well-developed network of campaign contributors, supporters well-versed in the process, the loyalty of party bosses, and the advantages of their official office, they almost always garner more than 15% of the delegates at state conventions and rarely need to gather signatures at all,” Taubes writes in the complaint.
“On the other hand, new candidates who are either challenging incumbents or running for a vacant seat – and who already face an uphill battle in getting on the ballot – must often collect thousands of signatures in order to qualify for ballot access.
“Because incumbents, in particular, are advantaged by the Ballot Access Laws, voters’ right to vote for the candidate of their choice is severely restricted. When incumbents are more difficult to challenge, more run unopposed.”
Faced with the same issue, Massachusetts has come up with one solution.
In a case entitled Goldstein v. Secretary of the Commonwealth, that state’s Supreme Judicial Court has ordered that the number of required signatures be reduced and that candidates be allowed to submit electronic signatures.
The court’s decision accepts a suggestion from the state that petitioners “scan and post or otherwise distribute their nomination papers online. Voters may then download the image of the nomination papers and either apply an electronic signature with a computer mouse or stylus, or print out a hard copy and sign it by hand. The signed nomination paper can then be returned to the candidate, or a person working on the candidate’s behalf, either in electronic form (by transmitting the “native” electronic document or a scanned paper document) or in paper form (by hand or mail). The candidates will still have to submit the nomination papers to local election officials in hard copy paper format, but the proposed process will alleviate the need for, and the risk associated with, obtaining ‘wet’ signatures.” (Read the full decision here.)
Click here to read a previous story about pandemic primary petitioning.