The State Bar of Texas board on Friday approved the nominations of Lisa Blue and Randy Sorrels for president-elect — two lawyers who started their campaigns as petition candidates. But the board then changed the rule for collecting signatures.

Under the new rule, petition signatures will not be valid if collected more than 180 days prior to the March 1 deadline for candidates to submit petitions to the bar. That means signatures could not be collected by a petition candidate prior to Sept. 2. Under existing rules, a lawyer must collect approximately 5,000 signatures to run as a petition candidate.

State Bar President Tom Vick said that rule “goes hand and hand” with another rule change approved Friday that would move the bar board's selection of president-elect candidates from January to the preceding September.

“The idea is to give all of these candidates about the same amount of time,” said Vick, a partner in Vick & Carney in Weatherford.

Austin solo practitioner Joe Longley, who won election as the bar's president-elect as a petition candidate in 2017, sees the rule in a different light.

“It's a form of candidate suppression of the highest magnitude,” said Longley, who voted against the rule limiting the time for collecting petition signatures.

The board approved the rule by a vote of 32 to 9, according to Lowell Brown, the bar's communications director.

Longley said the change in the rule would give the bar board's nominees an advantage over anyone who runs as a petition candidate. He said that Blue, a partner in Baron and Blue in Dallas, and Sorrels, managing partner of Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Sorrels, Agosto & Aziz in Houston, began collecting signatures in late August of 2017.

But Steve Fischer, who ran for president-elect as a petition candidate in 2013, said he would not have been able to run if this rule had been in effect at the time he was seeking the office. Fischer, now a solo practitioner in El Paso, said he had started collecting signatures in April 2012, the year before the election. He lost the race but inspired Longley to run.

“This was done to discourage people from running who don't have the imprimatur of the bar,” Fischer said of the new rule on petition signatures.

Fischer said he believes it helps the bar for people who want to run for office to go out and talk to lawyers as he did while collecting signatures.

Vick said he really believes that anybody committed to being a candidate can collect signatures within 180 days, or the individual can seek nomination by the bar's nominations and elections committee.

“There has to be some measure of reason to all of this, or otherwise we would have elections all year round,” Vick said.

The bar board took no action Friday on another proposal that would have the board decide whether to uphold a decision by the executive director to withhold a bar employee's private emails placed on the bar's server if requested by an officer or director of the organization. Vick said the chair of the committee that recommended that policy asked to pull it from the agenda Friday to allow for further study.