Mike Collier
Mike Collier, the two-time Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Texas’ system for independent candidates to get on the ballot.
The federal lawsuit, filed in Austin last week, says that the bar for an independent candidate to get on the ballot is so high as to be insurmountable.
“No state in the nation requires independent candidates for statewide office to gather more signatures in less time than Texas, and no other state is even close,” the lawsuit says.
Collier is joined in the lawsuit by several notable political figures, including former U.S. Rep. and Dallas Mayor Steve Bartlett, former Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, former state Sen. Kel Seliger and Sarah Stogner, a West Texas district attorney.
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[Independent candidates] must submit a petition with the number of signatures equal to 1% of the total vote for governor in the preceding election — more than 81,000 to get on the 2026 ballot. Voting in either party’s primary makes you ineligible to sign an independent candidate’s petition.
All signatures must be submitted by 30 days after the primary runoff, but a candidate cannot start gathering signatures until after the primary is decided. In most cases, that gives them 113 days to collect signatures.
But Collier is trying to get on the ballot for lieutenant governor, so he could not start gathering signatures until after the Democratic runoff concluded in late May. He will have just 30 days to gather tens of thousands of signatures, a requirement he says is “so burdensome that no independent candidate for statewide office has ever qualified for the ballot in Texas” in a race with a runoff.
What Collier is saying: When he declared his intent to run as an independent, Collier didn’t fully understand the mountain he was going to have to climb.
“A more cautious person would have studied it more carefully, but I wasn’t going to let that decide whether I would try,” he said. “Even once I learned what it required, I wouldn’t have been motivated to file the lawsuit except that the runoff turned an already insurmountable challenge into the absurd.”
Collier estimates he would need 1,500 volunteers gathering several signatures an hour, which is a challenge since about two-thirds of the people he has encountered during the petition drives are disqualified because they voted in the primary. He sought bids for companies to help him gather the signatures — one came in at over $3.2 million, even before the timeline was cut short.
The timeline for gathering signatures has remained the same, even as the number of Texas voters — and thus, the signature count — has skyrocketed, Collier said. This has unconstitutionally kept him and other independent candidates off the ballot, and prevented voters who want to elect independent candidates from participating fully.
See here for the background. I wish I could find a copy of the lawsuit, because I have some questions about what relief Collier is seeking from the court, but the best I could do was this Collier campaign press release, which is mostly talking points as press releases are wont to be. Let’s establish a couple of baseline facts.
– Here’s the law covering ballot access for independents in Texas. Collier is focusing on the number of signatures needed, which as noted in this case is about 81K; the restrictions on who can sign – specifically, that people who vote in the primary and/or runoff can’t sign – and the fact that he couldn’t start collecting signatures until after the runoff for the Democratic nomination for Lite Guv concluded; and the 30 days after the runoff deadline for filing his application, which really is a burdensome restriction.
– The fact that he was unlucky enough to have to wait out a runoff is key here. He can’t say that no independent candidate has ever been able to meet the requirements for statewide candidates, since Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman both accomplished it in 2006. Had he been running for Governor, or say Comptroller, he could have started collecting signatures in early March. He’d still complain about the number of signatures needed, but independent candidates for President are subject to the same petition signature requirements, and wannabe indies have lost multiple lawsuits on those grounds. I at least have no reason to think he’d succeed where they had failed.
– As I said, the big question is what he will ask the court to do if it rules in his favor. And I have to say, I can see a court agreeing that this law as written is unfair to the candidates who are aiming for a race where at least one of the primaries goes to a runoff. Given that a wannabe indie candidate for Governor could have started collecting sigs on March 4 but still would have had to warn signers not to partake in the runoff, one remedy would be to throw out that one portion of the law and let anyone start right after the primary. I could also see a case for lifting the restriction on voting in the primary, though I can also see the argument that allowing someone to both vote in the primary and sign an indie hopeful’s petition is a bit close to letting someone vote twice. I would also note that there are over 2.1 million registered voters in Harris County who didn’t vote in this year’s primaries, even though they were highly contested in relative terms. That’s enough to qualify 25 indie candidates for a statewide race, without duplicating a signature, all in one county. I’m just saying.
– If the judge rules that Texas’ law is overly burdensome, what might that mean for Collier? Well, the judge could throw out one of the provisions I noted above, and leave it up to the next Legislature to fix, hopefully with some guidance about what would be legal. That doesn’t mean that Collier is then put on the ballot – just because some aspects of the law are illegal doesn’t mean the state can’t impose some requirements – in which case the victory for Collier is one part principle, and one part “and so next time it will be easier for you”. The best-case scenario, I would think, is that the judge extends the deadline for getting signatures turned in. Given the other deadlines that exist for when ballots must be finalized, I’d guess that means he’d have until the end of July or so, maybe the first week of August. I really don’t think the judge will just put him on the ballot as part of any ruling.
– In which case, I hope for his sake that he’s busy collecting signatures now (*), because he would still have his work cut out for him. One could argue that he ought to have filed this lawsuit months ago, when a time-based remedy would have been more meaningful. Here I must note Collier’s admission that he had no clue what the law said when he first decided to go down this path. I think the state could reasonably argue that his ignorance of the law is not their problem. This is also why I doubt that even a broadly favorable ruling for him will include a free pass onto the ballot. Why not file after the primary filing deadline in December, when you could see the likelihood of a runoff looming, or right after the primary once you realized that you were stuck waiting until the end of May? None of this was unforeseeable.
Anyway. The clock is obviously ticking on this, because unless the judge in question does entertain the notion of an express pass to the ballot for Collier, he’ll still need to do something to qualify, and once we’re in about mid-August it will become a moot issue for this year. I will of course keep an eye on this. KVUE has more.
(*) I don’t actually hope he’s busy collecting signatures, because as noted in my previous post the one thing Mike Collier absolutely can do is guarantee Dan Patrick’s re-election by being on the ballot. Sorry, but we don’t have ranked-choice voting, a parliamentary system, or any other form of fantasy football governance. I note with a bit of amusement that most of the co-plaintiffs he lists in that press release are unhappy Republicans who it seems just don’t want to admit that the most expedient way to get the likes of Dan Patrick out of office is to vote for some Democrats. I know, that double bankshot does look impressive, but it’s really not that complicated.
I am embarrassed ever to have put his sticker on my car and his sign in my yard.
I do still appreciate the “Dan Patrick is bad for Texas” sticker, though. That will always be right.
As a third-party voter, and occasional write-in voter, as in the 2024 presidential election, I both totally understand why Collier is suing and totally support it.
I don’t expect tribalist members of the left hand of the duopoly to even try to understand, or to support, so this piece shocks me not at all. The last paragraph definitely doesn’t shock me at all, and no, Kuff, I did NOT vote for Trump in 2024, and never tell me that to my online face. (That said, Collier was a ConservaDem when he ran as a Dem, so his independent centrist shtick doesn’t surprise me.)
(I’m writing about this myself, as the Forward Party is now officially supporting the suit.)
Second comment. Greens have a Lite Guv candidate, and so do Libertarians, so the Trib is in error itself. Shock me.