Although it has been more than ten months since California voters passed Proposition 14, the “top-two open primary”, with 53.73% of the vote, the U.S. Justice Department still hasn’t approved the measure. On April 15, the Department of Justice requested more information from California.
Many years ago, the Mississippi legislature passed a bill to establish a top-two system, but the Justice Department never pre-cleared it, so it never went into practice in Mississippi. However, the Justice Department did approve Louisiana’s system in 1975.
California laws must be pre-cleared under section five of the Voting Rights Act, because four particular California counties had very lower voter participation many decades ago, when the benchmarks were set for determining which areas are covered by section five. The four counties are Monterey, Kings, Yuba and Merced. None of the special elections held under California’s top-two laws have included any part of those counties, but obviously the 2012 election will include them.
the natural born citizen eligibility act should force US-DOJ (and Bowen) to re-certify the 2008 CA-POTUS ballot — and prove the DNC/RNC candidates were NBC eligible — or not eligible.
So has the USDOJ just been stringing California out? The original submission was last October and the USDOJ has 60 days to interpose an objection, unless they request additional information, and then can get a reset of the 60 days.
The VRA pre-clearance stuff is due to a TOTAL perversion of the *plain English* of 15th Amdt, Sec. 1 — derived in turn from 14th Amdt, Sec. 2 — written by about the same persons in the gerrymander Congress.
It will one more embarassing moment when the party hack SCOTUS folks over-rule lots of MORON VRA SCOTUS opinions since 1966.
Elector definition stuff (positive or negative) is totally separate from other election stuff – top 2 primaries, gerrymanders, etc. etc.
Much too difficult for SCOTUS MORONS to understand.
Mr. Winger. So what happens to the results of the current elections, including the open primary to replace Jane Harman?
The May 17 special US House election is entirely in Los Angeles County. Since the 36th district isn’t in any of the 4 covered counties, there is no implementation problem for that special election. None of the 2011 special elections already held this year were in any of the 4 covered counties either. But of course in 2012 the covered counties are involved, obviously.
#2, twice the Justice Department has asked for more information from California.
When was the previous request, and when did California make their response?
The USDOJ website only lists the original submission date (October 19). I assume it is 2010-4220. The USDOJ is not a model of transparency.
Richard:
So what will happen, as far as you know, if a vacancy occurs in a District that includes all or part of one or more of those 4 Counties?
#7, I don’t know either.
#8, if a vacancy occurred in any of the four counties, requiring a special election, probably the Justice Department would speed up the process of evaluating the new law.
#7, #9, I believe that the previous request for additional information was in late October and was primarily for detailed statistics on registration and election results in the covered counties. I don’t know when the state responded to it, but they would have had 60 days from the date of the request. Judging by the length of time since then, it seems possible that this is actually a third request for more facts.