Case: Lean on McLean v. Showalter

NOTE: This case is being tracked in close to real time by the Stanford/MIT Healthy Elections Project. So for information, see their tracker.

According to their summary as of 11/19/2020,

Tracy McLean, a candidate for Mayor of the City of Richmond, Virginia, sought to enjoin enforcement of certain procedures for appearing on the ballot in the November 2020 Richmond Mayoral Election on the grounds that such restrictions violated her First Amendment rights in light of the challenges of collecting signatures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Richmond City Charter required that aspiring mayoral candidates submit a petition to the General Registrar with a minimum of 500 signatures of qualified voters of the city, including at least 50 qualified voters from each of the nine election districts, and the Virginia Code provided that such petition must be filed no later than June 9, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. The court granted a preliminary injunction and ordered that the signature requirement be reduced to 150 signatures including at least 10 qualified voters from each of the nine election districts and the deadline to file the related petition be extended to June 23, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.