Chicago Board of Elections Must Process 368 Petition Challenges

Posted on by
1

The deadline for filing challenges to petitions of candidates has closed in Chicago.  Chicago will be electing three citywide offices, and 50 alderman seats, in its February 2011 election.  The Board must hold hearings on 368 separate challenges to various petitions and statements of candidacy.  See this list.  Thanks to Phil Huckelberry for the link.

Most states do not use the challenge system.  In most states, employees of the elections office (either state or local) determine if petitions are valid.  Illinois, by contrast, assumes all petitions are valid, but anyone is free to challenge the validity of a petition, and then the Board of Elections must hold an adversarial hearing, which is time-consuming both for employees of the Board of Elections, and for representatives of the candidates.

At Least 13 State Legislators Have Switched Parties from Democratic to Republican Since the Election

Posted on by
3

According to this story, 13 state legislators have changed parties since the November 2, 2010 election.  All changes were made by Democrats switching to the Republican Party.  The 13 include one in South Dakota, one in Maine, six in Georgia, one in Louisiana, and four in Alabama.  In Louisiana, that one switch gave Republicans a majority in the House for the first time since the 19th century.

Nader Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Hear His Hawaii Ballot Access Case

Posted on by
3

On November 30, Ralph Nader asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his ballot access case from Hawaii.  The case is Nader v Cronin, 10-728.  The case originated in 2004, and challenges the Hawaii policy that requires six times as many signatures for an independent presidential candidate, as for an entire new party.  When a new party qualifies in Hawaii, it is entitled to its own primary, and the easy ability to run a candidate for every partisan office in the state.  Thus, a new party has far more impact on the ballot than a single independent presidential candidate.  Here is the cert petition.

Nader argues that requiring six times as many signatures for an independent presidential candidate than for a new party is not even rational.  The 9th circuit had upheld the law in an unsigned short opinion on September 1, 2010.

The U.S. Supreme Court now has two ballot access cases pending.  The other one is the Coffield case, which challenges the requirements for an independent or minor party candidate to get on the ballot for U.S. House in Georgia.  Those Georgia laws have not been fundamentally altered since 1964, and they are so difficult, they have never been used for U.S. House candidates.  An independent candidate did qualify in 1964, but that was before the legislature added a notary requirement, moved the deadline from October to July, limited when such petitions could start to circulate, and started requiring the petitions to be checked for validity.  The Georgia law requires a petition of 5% of the number of registered voters.

California Supreme Court Asks Attorney General to Respond in Case that Challenges Ballot Label Discrimination in Proposition 14

Posted on by
4

On November 29, the California Supreme Court asked California’s Attorney General to file a response brief in Field v Bowen, S188436.  This is the case that challenges two particular problems with the implementing law for California’s top-two system.  One of those problems is that the law does not let all candidates print their party label on the ballot.  The other problem is that the implementing legislation says write-ins should not be counted, yet it leaves in place many old state laws that say write-in space must be permitted on November ballots and that write-ins candidates may file a declaration of write-in candidacy for November elections.  The recent filing by the plaintiffs only emphasizes the party label discrimination, not the write-in problem.

Here is a Sacramento Bee story about this lawsuit.

Illinois House Kills Bill to Convert Open Primary to a Secret Open Primary

Posted on by
19

Illinois has always had an open primary.  Illinois has never asked voters to choose a party when they fill out voter registration forms.  Illinois primary rules require voters at the polls on primary day to publicly ask for one party’s primary ballot.

Earlier this year, Governor Pat Quinn rewrote HB 4842, to convert it into a bill that says Illinois should switch to a secret open primary.  A secret open primary is one in which each voter decides in the secrecy of the voting booth which party’s primary to vote in.  The Governor rewrote the bill under a process that is called an “Amendatory Veto.”

The Illinois legislature is currently meeting in its veto session.  The Illinois House took no action on the Governor’s version of HB 4842, so it has now died, and the Illinois primary will remain one in which a voter must publicly choose a primary ballot.  In an Illinois veto session, when the Governor carries out an amendatory veto, that bill is sent back to the house of origin.  If that house simply does nothing, the bill dies, because it is never sent over to the other house.

The news media of the United States have no consistent definition of “open primary”.  The term means something different in almost every state, if one only reads the newspapers.  In Pennsylvania, “open primary” means a closed primary in which the party organization makes no endorsement.  In Illinois, “open primary” means a secret open primary.  In California, “open primary” means a top-two system.  In Florida, “open primary” means a blanket primary.  In Kentucky, “open primary” means a closed primary in which independents can choose any party’s primary to vote in.  Because of this inconsistent terminology, Illinois newspapers are reporting that Governor Quinn’s “open primary” idea has been killed.