It is a matter of law!!!! It has NOTHING to do with petitions. Charles Haan and Curtis Strong ran UNOPPOSED for the Constitution Party of South Dakota and are therefore automatically the nominees and MUST be placed on the general election ballot in November.
In 2010, likewise, John Thune, Scott Heidepriem and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin all were not in the primaries because they ran unopposed for those offices in their respective parties. They were all placed on the general election ballot. Do election laws in South Dakota ONLY apply to Republicans and Democrats?
All candidates running for offices that have petitioning requirements should petition for primary just in case 2 other candidates within their party jump into the same contest, late in the game. Once that deadline has passed and there were no opposing candidates, they automatically receive their party’s nomination and are placed onto the general election ballot.
This egregious error made by the Secretary of State’s office against the CP of South Dakota and candidates Charles Haan and Curtis Strong MUST be publicly acknowledged and corrected! Are we a state of Laws or of Men?
12-6-9. Unopposed candidate automatically nominated–Primary not held if no contest. A candidate for nomination to an office, or election to a party office, having no opposing candidate within his party, shall automatically become the nominee of his party or elected party official for said office, and his name shall not be printed on the primary election ballot. If there are no opposing candidates for nomination or election of either state or county candidates in any county, no primary election shall be held in that county, and the candidates shall be automatically nominated or elected.
Source: SL 1929, ch 118, § 8; SDC 1939, § 16.0215; SL 1978, ch 98.
The SOS office was notified regarding this matter. There has still not been an official response or correction of this outrageous error!!!
Seems like the right thing to do.
I have a feeling that the SDCP coffers will be going to legal expenses soon, especially if they follow Richard’s suggestion.
So will the South Dakota LP be ballot qualified in 2016? They are qualified this year, correct?
There is a strong case to be made against the South Dakota law on how a gubernatorial candidate gets on a small ballot-qualified party’s primary. The basis is the US Supreme Court decision Storer v Brown, 415 US 724 (1974), which said the way to evaluate a petition requirement is to look at the percentage. Specifically, how many signatures are required divided by how many eligible signers there are. If the result is much over 5%, the law is unconstitutional. That is the way the Constitution Party can win in court. The argument presented in the post is not a winning argument. As another commenter said, the state will just say that party had no candidates.
The Constitution Party only has 595 registered members, so forcing it to get 250 of those people to sign the primary petition is too restrictive by far. The party sued over this in 2010 but the gubernatorial candidate refused to join the lawsuit, so the US District Court said no plaintiff had standing. But the judge went ahead and said the 250-signature requirement is constitutional anyway, but then the 8th circuit said the judge should not have ruled on anything substantive since he had ruled that the plaintiffs lack standing.
The Libertarian Party didn’t even try to get 250 signatures for a gubernatorial candidate this year, even though the LP has 1,277 registered members. The LP wasn’t ballot-qualified in South Dakota in 2010. So no one has met this horrible requirement since 2006, and back then, Chris Nelson was Secretary of State, and under him, the party affiliation of the signers of primary petitions was not checked.
Except that they did turn in enough signatures and got screwed, although that is a somewhat separate issue.
I’m guessing the judge will say that since Strong & Haan didn’t turn in enough petition signatures, the CP didn’t nominate a candidate. Here in Pennsylvania our petitions are labeled as “nomination papers”.
It will be.
Guess it’ll have to be dealt with in court then.