California Can Enforce ‘ABC Test’ on Political Canvassers (2)

A federal appeals court in San Francisco refused to block enforcement of California’s contentious worker-status test on doorknockers and signature gatherers for political campaigns.

Political campaign firm Mobilize the Message LLC and nonprofit organization Moving Oxnard Forward Inc. failed to make a plausible claim that the state’s “ABC test” for employment classification violates their First Amendment rights, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in a divided ruling Tuesday.

The decision follows the Ninth Circuit’s rejection of a similar First Amendment challenge brought by freelance journalists and photographers against a 2019 state law known as ...