running your honors my name is nicholas ronny i'm sort of general arkansas and i'm here on behalf of the arkansas secretary of state who's the defendant here may please the court the question on the ballot access challenge is ultimately whether a reasonably diligent rd party could be expected to comply with the requirement the district court did not apply that standard the district court did not even mention that standard and said it asked whether plaintiffs halfhearted signature collection efforts would be sufficient to comply with  and finding that they would not be sufficient it in joined arkansas was routine and imposed a requirement that it believes plaintiffs could meet solely because it believes plaintiffs could meet that requirement that is not the standard for determining constitutionality and is not the standard for demonstrate an undue burden to the contrary only regulations that discriminate or for use the two party system by imposing regulations that are reasonably diligent rd party could not be expected to meet  line of the concern or at least some of the concern that it for these rd parties it's so far in front of the general election in and that the rd party support usually crystallizes late in the process and how does that relate to the timing of the primary when these candidates rd party candidates don't go through the primaries and you still have the general election concerned now that or one hundred days out i think there's a difference between candidate and party and i together you know you've got people to try and acquire signatures at a time when when you know you're not oh a year and a half away from the general election even if you're a party you barely caught election i think you're going to act it get you have to consider the system holistically and i think part of that is actually considering the fact that the signature requirement here the threshold is so low it's a one point five percent so much has changed quite what and i mean like i said earlier what one of the big things change is the primaries are simply earlier now what difference does that make when the new party doesn't run in a primary if they do it by convention so what difference does it make t the last day but it was during the week long party from sir but if somebody wanted to jump in the day it be too late i think that's right your home but that's that's really not the issue in this case we're not talking about candidates that would be a totally different case it's also true that independen interest here really i guess i'm struggling with the state interest is it is a general matter treating hannity and i'm not saying that's a minimal interest but is that the interest in requiring  well that part of the problem with the north dakota system that was at issue in the clean one for instance was that they were training republicans and democrats just went from every other kind of candidate they had and if you are republican and democrat under north dakota system that it did at the time you were automatically qualify for the ballot you didn't have to agree to pretensions you didn't have to collect signatures you didn't have to do anything by a specific date but those signatures in order to make the ballot were candidates by virtue of the republican or democrat wrong ballot and everybody else was required by the media retention requirement or collect signatures by a certain date and that distracted from the interest in requiring a modicum support or having a date and it just treated everybody differently by years ago and that makes it a critical differen careful judicial scrutiny there's another reason why this court should do careful she dishes scrutiny the state of arkansas has had over  signatures required you also look at the dead watching the time you can collect those troops and the past history up success and all of us i think argue against what has happened here because emergency was passed it would go in effect when they realized it wasn't going to affect the libertarians have something that's never been complied with and i think that's very important i think that was part of the appeal politics i think most of the testimony here and most of what we know is that the best majority of people just are obsessed with politics with it constantly thinking about it and as the supreme court has noticed only when people get dissatisfied with the major parties do they declared unconstitutional after they got reversed and set back down for further findings and them as the arkansas legislature had done continually they chased by passing legislation to correct that course they unconstitutional the st one was actually appealed they ended up dismissing it after all the briefing it but done in there was all arguments out and that is something i think it's a ninety day  actually it was new from what it was in twenty six when the green party had their case in the district court it was at that time you had one hundred and fifty day to collect signatures so from that standpoint once again it's not really a worse a much worse deadline then when you had deadlines anywhere from january to may of the election year but the period of time actually collapsed by sixty day now but they made a point somewhat in their argument and also in their briefs about our maybe the libertarians should have just kept collecting petitioner's petitions they didn't use all the time actually they started on it with st they did collect signatures it took about a while to get up speed on it but when they t tornadoes it has an effect on that limited period but they're not just satisfied with having this weekly love period unlike in alabama where you have a limited time and you have a deadline and set st tuesday in june of the election  date you have to consider it all together and past experience but i'll tell you something just looking at registered voters i think it's better to look at the people who actually turn out to vote because as we all know a lot about who should voters don't vote we have sometimes forty or fifty or sixty but that's the amount of time that you have to collect the signatures and the total number we know that this number though is as the u s supreme court said when it said one percent of the vote cast for governor in the  and the argument is i take it is that the injunction was not nearly drawn and should be reversed on those i think it is clearly drawn because it was being very cautious and conservative in what is going to be the least disruptive thing the judge just didn't make up the ten thousand signatures that's what the law been for like five or six election cycles operating totally properly and if the court had said well i'll let you have a year to collect the signatures or i put the deadline in january or july or you know whatever that  would be more disruptive i think the court should always be cautious to try to do something that will be easily good and will not be so disruptive so i'm saying that i think the court was just absolutely correct in the way they handled it because it looked at what the law would be and until late february actually the ball even if you had ten thousand signatures would be worse because you'd still have this six or seven months or more to your petition deadline signatures they were much more successful than they had been two years before they had a high but if you write a dr pocket testified about how careful they had been in checking signatures and what they had worked on and while they scoff about never complied with but the green party has basically hasn't been able to do it dr pocket testified about that he talked to people in the green party they weren't able to do it that was the ten thousand signature requirement  in the three percent and this court itself back in two thousand and eleven when they had the green party case talking about the retention requirement of three percent of the vote for governor or president take this court specifically on conservatively when it put that in effect as to what it was going to require and that libertarians when they tried to get in on the last business day in june friday june th wednesday three business days later they had their decision there was no reason for them to keep collecting signatures on something that might or might not have been a while and something that was a great burden on them this court in the something that's previously in a more mild form by deadline and time to collect signatures has been twice declared unconstitutional and well when there was an appeal to the th circuit and then they backed out of the last minute and th court said that the party their reform party was to be considered in all respects the prevailing party i think that is very significant they district court did not in  decision say that they were met it was making a ruling because they thought one of the political parties had done this for purposes to protect themselves however i would say that the circumstantial and so i think in those regards this law is clearly unconstitutional i would say and i would suggest you the evidence and the facts and history suggest that it is overwhelmingly unconstitutional and in that regard i think what the district court was going to get fame it should be noted that ten thousand is actually more than one percent of the last vote for governor in arkansas which of course is a factor but couple that with the deadline with the time to collect signatures and with the fact that no one ever complied with this for decades and decades i think that is what causes us to condemn this law and i just can't see what else the district court could have done because everything else i think would have been worse if they just said why didn't you just collect signatures till march march st or why don't i think there's a primary it's just a weird quirk in arkansas statute about the way they write it but the primary is super tuesday that's the real primary that we're talking about here the run off primaries what the statute refers to as the primary that's the more general