The U.S. Supreme Court releases advance information to the public about which cases it has on conference, for any particular conference date. The purpose of the conference is to decide whether to hear various cases. There are now three election law cases which have been through at least one conference, but the Court has neither accepted them nor rejected them, nor even set a new conference date for them.
The case over the special U.S. Senate election in Illinois has been through three conferences, the last of which was March 4. There is still no action by the Court on this case (which is really two cases, Burris v Judge and Quinn v Judge), and the Court hasn’t even set a new conference date.
The case over Dallas vote-counting machines and the Voting Rights Act had a conference on March 18, with no result and no new conference date announced.
Most recently, the Green Party of Connecticut case over discriminatory public funding had a conference on March 25, with no result and no new conference date. Of the three cases, the Connecticut case absense of action is the least puzzling. Another case involving public funding (from Arizona) will get a decision on the merits in the next two or three months, so it is plausible that the Court is holding the Connecticut case for further action when the Arizona decision comes down. But it is difficult to understand why the court has put action on the Illinois special election case, and the Texas vote-counting machine case, into the indefinite future.
Has Dallas County attempted to withdraw their appeal?
The Dallas County Judge*, who was elected in November 2010 is(was?) a lawyer representing the Texas Democratic Party in the case.
After the Dallas County Election Administrator filed the appeal to the US Supreme Court, the County Judge called a meeting of the board that appoints the county election administrator. This board had not met in about 2 decades, and its sole duty is to hire or fire the county elections administrator.
After learning secondhand that the board was going to meet, the county election administrator was meeting with John Wiley Price, a black County Commissioner who had been seeking to get rid of the elections administrator. Price has no official role in his hiring or firing, but the administrator agreed to resign with an effective date in a couple of months. Price went and talked to the County Judge, and told the administrator that it would be better if the resignation was immediate.
I don’t know why you persist in calling them vote-counting machines. They are voting machines. The issue is how they interpret the interaction between the voter and the user-interface.
The voting machines had been pre-cleared twice by the USDOJ, once when they were deployed for early voting, and once when they were deployed for precinct voting.
The Democrats had lost a similar case in Travis County over a different type of voting machine, but with the same behavior regarding interpretation of interaction when straight ticket voting. The core of the Dallas County defense was the ruling in the early case.
A Democrat lost a close race for state representative in Dallas County, and filed suit. The district court ruled in favor of Dallas County as far as the substantive constitutional issues (equal protection, due process) with regard to the voting machines, but ruled that Dallas County should have sought pre-clearance for the change in interpretation of interaction with a electronic device vs. interaction with the punch cards that they replaced.
After the court made its decision, Dallas County did submit the interpretation of voter interaction to the USDOJ which did not interpose any objection.
The issue before the Supreme Court is whether Dallas County had to submit something as a “change” when it is questionable whether it was a change at all.
*In Texas, the County Judge is the head of county government, rather than a judicial officer. There are also county judges at law, who are one of three levels of trial court judges.