Would-be Montana candidates win court case, still won’t be on ballot

HELENA – A federal judge sided with three would-be candidates who argued they didn’t have enough time to gather the signatures required to qualify for Montana’s special congressional election – but their names still aren’t going on the ballot.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris on Saturday ordered Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton to reduce the number of voter signatures needed to place minor party and independent candidates on the ballot from 14,268 to 400.

But the judge did not extend Stapleton’s March 6 deadline to turn in signatures, which means the three men who sued for ballot access – Thomas Breck of the Green Party and independents Steve Kelly and Doug Campbell – still don’t qualify for the ballot.

“None of the candidates met the judge’s lowered signature threshold,” Stapleton spokeswoman Morgan Williams said Sunday.

Late Sunday, the attorneys for the three candidates filed a notice of appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Barring an appeals court’s intervention, Morris’ ruling means Democrat Rob Quist, Republican Greg Gianforte and Libertarian Mark Wicks will remain the only candidates in the May 25 election to replace former U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, who resigned March 1 to become interior secretary.

The lawsuit had threatened to force election ballots to be reprinted, which would have cost about $100,000 and would have caused the state to miss Monday’s deadline to mail ballots to military and overseas voters.

Breck, Kelly and Campbell had argued in their lawsuit that they had no time to prepare a signature-gathering campaign, an extremely short window to collect signatures and had to do so during the winter in an off-year for elections.

All of those factors made it impossible to gather 14,268 signatures by March 6, which violated their constitutional rights, they argued. They asked the judge to order the state to place their names on the ballot and to block the election from going forward until it had done so.

Attorneys for the state argued that Montana has a compelling state interest to protect the stability of its electoral system in the final weeks before an election.

Adding three candidate names to the ballot at this late date would likely undermine that stability and confuse voters, they argued.

But Morris agreed with Breck, Kelly and Campbell that the severe burden to their constitutional rights trumped the state’s argument.

However, the judge wrote he would not go so far as to order their names on the ballot. Instead, he lowered the required number of signatures by using the estimate of a witness who testified that a diligent signature gatherer could collect 10 to 15 signatures per hour.

Between March 1, when Zinke resigned and the special election was announced, and March 6, when the signatures were due, a candidate working on his or her own for eight hours a day could have collected 400 signatures, Morris wrote.

All three candidates fell short of even that amount. Campbell collected “a few hundred” signatures, Breck gathered 10 signatures and Kelly none, according to Morris.

“We certainly agree with the judge’s conclusion that the ballot access scheme is very likely unconstitutional,” said Bryan Sells, an attorney for Breck, Kelly and Campbell. Sells said the appeal to the 9th Circuit will challenge “the scope of the judge’s injunction.”