On December 22, U.S. District Court John G. Koeltl, a Clinton appointee, upheld the New York statewide petition requirement for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties. He also upheld the new definition of a political party, a group that polled 2% of the vote every two years for the office at the top of the ballot (Governor in midterm years, and president in presidential years). SAM Party of New York v Kosinski, s.d., 1:20cv-323. Here is the 37-page opinion.

Judge Koetl issued the opinion less than 24 hours after the oral argument. His opinion has serious factual errors. Page 23 says New York requires the seventh highest number of signatures, when actually New York has the fourth highest number of signatures for president. His statement is based on errors concerning California, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The document he relied on says Pennsylvania requires 57,913 signatures, when actually it requires 5,000 signatures as the result of a 2012 court decision, Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele. The document he relied on for North Carolina says that state requires 82,542 signatures, when actually a new party needs 13,757 signatures. The document he relied on for California says California requires 220,474 signatures in 2022. Actually it is impossible to petition onto the California general election ballot in a midterm year, and no one needs more than 65 signatures to petition onto the primary ballot.

Page twenty-three says New York is “in the middle of the pack” regarding its 2% vote test for party status, but he doesn’t mention that the typical state lets a vote for any statewide race count towards party qualification, whereas New York requires 2% for president, in a presidential year. Evidence in the case, but ignored by Judge Koetl, shows that it is far easier for a minor party to poll 2% for a lesser statewide race than for president.

Page twenty-one mentions precedents from other states upholding vote tests more difficult than 2%, but the opinion does not say that all of those states (Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Arkansas) have a procedure by which a group that fails the vote test can regain its party status before the next election, with a petition. New York has no such procedure.

Pages four and twenty-three say the increase in the vote test, which was last changed in 1935, is justified because the state has four times the population it had in the 1930’s. But he doesn’t say that the number of votes cast has not even doubled. In 1936 New York cast 5,596,399 votes for president; in 2020 it cast 8,594,826, an increase of 53.6%, not 300%. Clearly the number of votes cast is more relevant than the population.

The opinion says the increases are needed to save money for the state’s public funding program. The decision does not say that the Second Circuit already ruled in Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield that if a state has public funding, it need not give the money to small qualified parties. The opinion also says the increases are needed to combat “ballot crowding”, but the state introduced no evidence about ballot crowding. To the extent that New York ballots are confusing, the state is free to switch to an office-group ballot.

LabourList has this article which says that the Labour Party is now very supportive of ending “First Past the Post”, which is the common British term for the type of system that the United States, Great Britain, and Canada use…single-member districts, with whichever candidate getting the most votes being elected.

LabourList is considered one of the four biggest political blogs in Great Britain. It has existed since 2009. The story is by Joe Sousek, national coordinator of Labour for a New Democracy.

In the past, the Labour Party has been an opponent of changing the system. The Liberal Democratic Party has been Britain’s chief advocate for a change. Thanks to Fairvote for the link.

The Alaska Supreme Court will hear Kohlhaas v State on Tuesday, January 18. This is the challenge to the initiative passed in 2020 that eliminates party nominees yet which allows party labels on ballots. The only political party in the case is the Alaskan Independence Party. The initiative sends the top-four primary vote-getters to the general election ballot; no one else can be on the general election ballot. The initiative also provides for ranked choice voting in the general election, but not the primary election.

Although one of the issues in the case is whether the state constitution permits ranked-choice voting, the bigger issue in the case is freedom of association for political parties. News stories in the mainstream press tend to ignore the freedom of association part of the case. The Alaska Supreme Court in the past has ruled that the state constitution gives even more protection to political parties than the federal courts do.