On October 18, Arkansas filed this brief in defense of its new ban on out-of-state initiative circulators. Liberty Initiative Fund v Thurston, e.d., 4:21cv-460.
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Dr. Ervin Yen, who was a Republican State Senator in Oklahoma 2014-2018, has changed his registration to “independent” and will run for Governor in 2022 as an independent candidate. See this story. He was the first, and so far the only, Oklahoma legislator of Asian descent.
A Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge has ruled that some voters are entitled to a trial over the reliability of vote-counting machines used in Philadelphia and Northampton Counties. See this story. The machines, known as ExpressVote XL, are manufactured by Elections Software & Systems (ESS) Corporation. They work by having a voter insert a blank ballot into the machine. Then the voter uses the computer touch-screen to mark the ballot.
Most vote-counting machines in the U.S. are different. They ask the voter to fill out a paper ballot, which is then inserted into the vote-counting device.
The Christian Science Monitor has this story about negotiations between various political parties to form a new German government. The title of the story is “As German Coalition Starts to Gel, a libertarian Party Plays Kingmaker.” The reference is to the Free Democratic Party, which placed fourth and which is described as a libertarian party of sorts.
The top-two system has existed in Washington state starting in 2008, and in California since 2011. In both states, we now have an abundance of evidence that top-two is destructive to minor parties and to voters who want to vote for minor party candidates in the general election.
There have been 186 instances when a minor party member ran for federal or state office under a top-two election in those two states, and there is not one single instance when any of them managed to qualify for the general election ballot, except in races when one of the two major parties didn’t run anyone.
Anyone who knows this, and who is in favor of letting minor parties exist, ought to be persuaded not to support a top-two system. Unfortunately, there are voices who are pro-third party, but who still say they favor top-two systems. One is Andrew Yang; another is journalist and political activist Jared Alper of New York state, who has this Fulcrum article that expresses dismay at how minor parties are treated in the U.S. (especially in debates) but who says he is in favor of “nonpartisan primaries”, which is a synonym for top-two, top-four, and top-five systems. Thanks to Fairvote for the link.