On September 25, the Green Party national steering committee will begin voting on a location for the 2012 national convention. Baltimore and Sacramento have submitted bids. Both cities propose dates for the convention of July 13-15, 2012.
The Green Party 2008 convention was July 10-12. The party’s 2004 and 2000 national conventions were in late June.
On November 8, Virginia elects a new legislature. Virginia has 100 House seats, all of which are up. In only 29 districts will voters see both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. Most districts only have one person on the ballot. Also running for the 100 House seats are five independent candidates, two Independent Green Party nominees, and two Libertarians.
Long-time independent House member Lacey Putney is running for re-election again. He has opponents from both major parties. He is age 83, and has been re-elected as an independent candidate every two years, starting in 1971, for a total of twenty elections in a row. Before he was an independent, he had been in the legislature for ten years as a Democrat.
In the 40 State Senate contests, there are three independent candidates and one nominee of the Independent Green Party.
Arizona has registration by party. Traditionally, the voter registration form section for “Party Preference” has just consisted of a blank line, and anyone filling out the form can write in the name of a party. Voters who leave it blank are classed as independents.
This year, the legislature passed HB 2701, dealing with voter registration. It says that the voter registration form shall list the two largest political parties, based on existing voter registration data. So, the new form has three checkboxes: “Republican”, “Democratic”, and “Other”. Under the “Other” box is a line that is only eleven-sixteenths of an inch long, and only one-eighth of an inch tall.
During the last 30 years, and perhaps all the way back to the beginning of voter registration forms, no state previously printed voter registration forms that list some parties that are entitled to their own primary, but not all parties that are entitled to their own primary. Therefore, there is no case law on whether a form like this violates equal protection. The form is especially unfair to Libertarians, because a person with normal handwriting could not even fit the word “Libertarian” into a space that small. Similarly, it is difficult to fit the word “independent” into that space. However, presumably, if a voter leaves the entire section blank, that voter will be classed as an independent.
Besides the two major parties, the Americans Elect, Green, and Libertarian Parties are entitled to a primary in 2012 in Arizona.
On September 20, the Michigan House Redistricting and Elections Committee passed SB 584. It keeps the Michigan presidential primary on February 28, but provides that voters must request one particular party’s primary ballot. The list of which voters choose which party’s primary ballot is then a public record. UPDATE: on the afternoon of September 20, the bill passed the Senate, and is on its way to the Governor.
Past presidential primaries in Michigan, in most years, have been secret open primaries, in which the voter decides in the secrecy of the voting booth which party’s presidential primary to vote in. However, even then, the voter had to confine voting to only one party’s primary ballot. Thanks to Frontloading HQ for this news.
On September 19, Tim Quinn, an independent candidate for Mayor of Elyria, Ohio, at the November 8, 2011 election, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to get on the ballot. His petition was not questioned, but he was still kept off the ballot because he voted in the partisan primary. The Ohio election law has no law, saying that independent candidates must not have voted in a partisan primary. Ohio only bans independent candidates who ran in a partisan primary.
Nevertheless, some Ohio election officials read the law to mean that independent candidates must not have voted in a primary, although other Ohio election officials do not read the law that way. Earlier this year, Quinn asked the Ohio Supreme Court to put him on the ballot, but that Court simply refused to hear his case. See this story.
On September 19, the California Court of Appeals issued a 30-page opinion in Field v Bowen, A129946. It upholds the discriminatory law that allows members of qualified parties to list their party on the ballot, but does not allow members of unqualified parties to list their party on the ballot.
As to the law that says write-in space should be printed on the ballot, but that write-ins cannot be counted in November for Congress and state office, the Court said, “Including a line for write-in votes on a ballot when those votes will not be counted raises constitutional questions.” So, the Court, in an amazing display of judicial activism, “solved” the problem by ordering, “No lines or spaces for write-in votes for voter-nominated offices can be placed on general election ballots.”
Just to be clear, the Court was confronted with conflicting election laws. Section 8606 says, “A person whose name has been written on the ballot as a write-in candidate at the general election for a voter-nominated office shall not be counted.” But, section 15340 says, “Each voter is entitled to write the name of any candidate for any public office, including that of President and Vice President of the United States, on the ballot of any election.” And section 13207(a), “form of ballot” says, “There shall be printed on the ballot…the names of candidates with sufficient blank spaces to allow the voters to write in names not printed on the ballot.”
So, faced with two laws that said write-ins should be allowed, and one law that says they may not be counted, the Court arbitrarily told the Secretary of State to ignore the latter two laws. The Court did not say that sections 15340 and 13207 are unconstitutional; it merely dictated that these two laws should not be followed.
As to the party label issue, the Court simply said that in 1980, the California Supreme Court had upheld the old policy of only printing party labels on the ballot for candidates who had been nominated in the primary of a qualified political party. The Court did not grapple with the point that under California’s top-two system, parties no longer nominate candidates for Congress and state office, and the rationale for treating candidates for these offices differently no longer exists. And as to the prohibition of the word “independent” on the ballot for Congress and state office, the decision says the label “no party preference” is just as good as the word “independent”. But the Court did not explain any state interest in banning the word “independent”, and of course California law still allows the ballot label “independent” for presidential candidates who qualify for the November ballot by petition.