On May 31, this brief was filed in Ritter v Migliori, 21A772, in the U.S. Supreme Court, by the advocates of counting ballots in which the voter had forgotten to add a date next to his or her signatures on the outer envelope of postal ballots.
The North Carolina Green Party has collected the needed 13,865 valid signatures to be on the ballot for 2022 and 2024, according to this news story. This is the highest petition requirement that any state Green Party has met since 2016, when it overcame the Illinois requirement of 25,000. Thanks to Chris Cole for the link.
This is the first time the Green Party has ever successfully petitioned in North Carolina. It never appeared on the ballot in that state until 2018, and it was on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 because of a 2017 law that put all parties on the ballot automatically if their presidential nominee had been on the ballot in at least 35 states in the preceding presidential election.
In North Carolina, when a party gets on the ballot in a midterm year, it is also automatically on the ballot for the following presidential year.
On May 27, a 3-judge U.S. District Court ordered Ohio to use legislative district maps that had been chosen by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, even though that plan had been rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court as an unconstitutional gerrymander. Here is the opinion in Gonidakis v LaRose, s.d., 2:22cv-773.
The vote is 2-1. The legislative primaries will be held on Tuesday, August 2. Independent candidates for the legislature have until August 1 to submit their petitions. The majority decision is signed by Judges Amul Thapar and Benjamin Beaton, Trump appointees. The dissent is by Judge Algenon Marbley, a Clinton appointee.
This article presents data to show that enough persons who had voted in Georgia in Democratic primaries in 2020 voted in the 2022 Republican primary, and caused Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to win his primary outright.
It also shows that enough Democrats in North Carolina changed their registration to “Republican” so as to vote in this year’s Republican primary and cause the defeat of Congressman Madison Cawthorn.
Georgia has open primaries, in which there is no registration by party, and any voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
North Carolina has partisan registration. Independents can vote in any party’s primary they wish, but party members can only vote in their own party’s primary. Therefore, party-switchers must re-register in advance of any primary.
On Monday, May 30, Dr. Mehmet Oz asked the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to file an amicus brief in Ritter v Migliori, 21A772. This is the case in which the Third Circuit used the “materiality” portion of the federal Voting Rights Act to rule that Pennsylvania ballots in which the voter forgot to add a date to the signature should still count. The Third Circuit ruling noted that all postal ballots receive a date-stamp when they are received.
Here is the proposed amicus, which doesn’t even discuss the federal Voting Rights Act, and which says that allowing such ballots might interfere with the recount currently underway in the May 2022 Republican U.S. Senate primary. The amicus also says that allowing such ballots (all of whom concern a general election for local office in 2021) would confuse the voters.
