New political party says shutdown orders keep it from getting on November ballot

A political party formed last year sued Secretary of State Alex Padilla over a law they say is illegally keeping them from placing a presidential candidate on California's general election ballot in November.

The Common Sense Party is challenging a state law that requires a new party to show at least 0.33% of registered voters in the state are members in order to make the ballot. The plaintiffs say the requirement does not apply to existing parties and is too onerous during a pandemic. The Common Sense Party v. Padilla, 2:20-cv-01091-MCE-CKD (E.D. Cal., filed May 29, 2020).

The new party was announced last fall as an alternative to the two-party duopoly. Its chairman and co-plaintiff in the case is Tom Campbell, a former five-term Republican congressman and state finance director. Policy positions listed on the party's website appear to stake out a mix of socially liberal values on race and gender issues combined with more conservative positions on taxation and regulation.

The party's legal team consists of Quentin L. Kopp, a 91-year-old political independent and former judge who served in the California Senate, as well as James R. Sutton and Bradley W. Hertz of the Sutton Law Firm PC in San Francisco. They argue the party is unable to reach the threshold of more than 68,000 signatures due to Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home orders, leading to violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

"While these requirements are constitutional under normal circumstances, the current public health emergency, and the governor's executive orders issued in response to the emergency, make the requirement impossible to attain -- in effect serving as a block to the November 2020 ballot," they argue.

The complaint goes on to state the party had 19,038 registered voters in California as of March 8 and would probably have met the threshold under normal circumstances.

The law being challenged was passed in response to Proposition 14, passed by voters in 2010, which created the top-two primary system in California. The prior law required signatures equal to 1% of the vote in the last gubernatorial election, which would have required nearly twice as many signatures.