According to this story, a 3-judge U.S. District Court will hear three lawsuits challenging Illinois’ new legislative districts during the week of December 6.
2
On November 5, the Maine Libertarian Party submitted a new piece of evidence in its pending ballot access case, Baines v Bellows, 1:19cv-509. The case concerns several ballot access problems for new and small political parties in Maine. One of the issues is whether the state has any justification to forcibly convert all party members to independent voter status when a party loses its qualified status, without consulting those voters.
The new evidence is a sample letter that New Mexico election officials send to all voters registered into a party that has just lost its ballot qualification. New Mexico, like most states that have registration by party, does not revoke the party registration for members of parties, when that party loses its qualified status. Instead, as the evidence shows, New Mexico sends a letter to all such voters, telling them that their party is no longer qualified, just in case they might want to change party. But the letter makes it clear that the voter need not do anything, and that the voter will remain a member of that party, qualified or not, unless the voter decides to make a change.
The point of this evidence is to show that Maine could have the same tolerant policy, without any election-administration problem, if it wanted to.
The Fordham Law Review has published Volume 90, number 2. It includes ten papers from its spring 2021 Presidential Election Symposium, and all of them can be read via this link.
One of the papers is by me, and it shows that in all history, no state that required more than 5,000 signatures for all methods to get onto the general election ballot ever had a crowded general election ballot. There are no instances in which such states had more than eight candidates on the ballot (for any office for which only one winner is to be elected), except that there are two instances when New York had nine candidates for a single office, in 1980 and 1996.
Justice John Harlan wrote in Williams v Rhodes in 1968 that eight candidates for a single office on the ballot is not so many as to confuse voters, and no justice ever contradicted that statement, in any decision of the Court.
On the evening of November 5, the U.S. House passed the infrastructure bill that had already passed the U.S. Senate months ago. Thirteen Republicans in the House voted for the bill, bucking their party’s leadership. They are Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Gabarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David McKinley of West Virginia, Tom Reed of New York, Chris Smith of New Jersey, Fred Upton of Michigan, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, and Don Young of Alaska.
There are fourteen Republicans in the U.S. House from top-two states (Washington and California). There are also five Republicans in the U.S. House from Louisiana, a state in which (like the top-two states) there are no party nominees. Over and over, we are told that partisan primaries are the evil that causes polarization. Yet none of the 19 Republicans from the states without partisan congressional primaries voted for the Infrastructure bill.
Opponents of party primaries ought to take note.
The Republican nominee for U.S. House, Florida 20th district, special election of January 2022, is an ex-felon. Jason Mariner nevertheless won the Republican nomination in this overwhelmingly Democratic district. Under case law going back over 100 years, his ex-felon status makes no difference; he can run for Congress because the U.S. Constitution sets forth the requirements to be a member of Congress, and states cannot add to them.
Nevertheless, according to this story, some Florida officials don’t know the caselaw and wonder if he is eligible to run. Thanks to Ken Bush for the link.
Mariner defeated his only opponent in the Republican special primary of November 2. He polled 58%.