The Supreme Court has acknowledged “that some cut off period is necessary ... to verify the validity of signatures on the petitions, to print the ballots, and, if necessary, to litigate any challenges.”
American Party v. White, 415 U.S. 767, 787 n. 18, 94 S.Ct. 1296, 1309 n. 18, 39 L.Ed.2d 744 (1974). Our resolution of the deadline issue here may well be mandated by the Supreme Court's decision in
Jenness, 403 U.S. at 431, 91 S.Ct. at 1970. There the Court held that a filing deadline of the second Wednesday in June was not “unreasonably early,”
id. at 438, 91 S.Ct. at 1974, even when it operated in a scheme that was otherwise more restrictive in many respects than the one at issue here. In
Jenness, minority party candidates were required to obtain signatures equalling five percent of the number of
registered voters in the last election, a number relatively higher than the five percent of
actual voters required by Oklahoma.
See id. at 432, 91 S.Ct. at 1971; see also Hall, 766 F.2d at 1173–74 (pointing out that pool of registered voters is larger than pool of actual voters). Moreover, in
Jenness minority parties had only 180 days to circulate petitions, as opposed to the one-year period provided in Oklahoma. We see no principled way to distinguish the circumstances approved in
Jenness from the circumstances before us.
Here, as in
Jenness, the state