An Alabama voter rights group sued the Secretary of State earlier this year to gain free access to a partial list of the registered voters. On June 2, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson, a Carter appointee, ruled against the Secretary of State’s request to dismiss the lawsuit. Now there will be a trial.

The plaintiff is the Greater Birmingham Ministries. It wants the list of persons whose voter registration was purged. The state is willing to sell these records, but the plaintiff believes the federal Voting Rights Act guarantees them a free copy. Greater Birmingham Ministries v Merrill, m.d., 2:22cv-205.

This case had originally been filed in the northern district, but on April 13, the judge in that district ruled that it must be filed in the middle district, which contains the state capital, Montgomery. The case was then re-filed in Montgomery.

John Myers, Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief in Sacramento, has this analysis of California’s top-two system. There is one riveting piece of news in the article that I had missed. For the fourth time, it appears likely that the majority party in a California race has been disenfranchised. In the Fourth State Senate district, a strongly Republican district, six Republicans and two Democrats ran in the June 7, 2022 primary. The two Democrats appear to have placed first and second, leaving no Republican on the November 2022 ballot. The law bans write-in votes in general elections for congress and partisan state office, so there is nothing Republicans can do to win this seat in November.

The Fourth District has the fourth-highest Republican registration of all 40 State Senate districts, and its part of California has been represented in the State Senate by Republicans continuously for over fifty years. Here is a link to the election returns for this district. One of the Republican candidates in this week’s primary in this district is former Congressman George Radanovich, who served in Congress 1994-2010 and never came close to losing. He did not run for re-election in 2010.

The other notable point about the article is that it misleads the reader. It says that before the top-two system was in place, the Democrats and Republicans generally did not let independent voters vote in their congressional and state office primaries. The California press has consistently misreported this point. For all congressional and state office primaries from 1998 through the beginning of the top-two system in 2011, independent voters were allowed to vote in Republican and Democratic primaries. For those who don’t believe this, google “History of Political Parties That Have Adopted Party Rules Regarding No Preference Voters”, which takes one to the Secretary of State’s website. Thanks to Eric Wong for the link.

The federal lawsuit filed last year by Mayor Byron Brown of Buffalo, against the May petition deadline for independent candidates, is beginning to move ahead. All discovery must be completed by November 1, 2022 in Meadors v Erie County Board of Elections, w.d., 1:21cv-982.

There is virtual unanimity among court precedents that independent candidate petitions (for office other than president) cannot be earlier than the date on which major parties choose their nominees (except when states have very late primaries, in September). Yet New York, since 2019, has required independent candidate petitions to be submitted almost a month before the June primaries. In 2021, the U.S. District Court Judge enjoined the May petition deadline, but the Second Circuit, without explaining why, stayed his order.