This newspaper story says the Illinois legislature will work on re-doing the legislative districting on August 31. The legislature already redrew the districts earlier this year, before the census data was released. The legislature used census estimates, but then lawsuits were filed against the original 2021 plan.
On August 20, the Sixth Circuit asked Ohio to respond to the pending petition for rehearing en banc in Thompson v DeWine, 21-3514. This is the case over whether petitioning relief should have been granted to initiative proponents during 2020, due to the health crisis. The three-judge Sixth Circuit panel had said the case is moot, but the petition for rehearing made a strong case against that conclusion.
On August 23, U.S. District Court Judge Leigh May issued an order in the Georgia Libertarian Party ballot access case, Cowen v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-4660. She suggested an interim requirement for district office (for independent candidates and minor parties) of 1% of the number of registered voters in the district. She also suggested that the filing fee be required as well.
She issued this order because she had invalidated the 5% petition for district office on March 29, 2021, and the legislature has not acted to replace the old law. For U.S. House, 1% will be quite difficult, approximately 5,100 signatures. The petitions are due in July 2022 and cannot start to circulate until January 2022. The filing fee is also quite high, 3% of the annual salary of the office, so that will be over $5,000 for U.S. House. However, ballot access will now be within reach of some minor parties for state legislative races. The number of signatures in the average State House district will be 400 signatures.
The order is not final; the judge wants both sides to comment before she makes it final.
On August 20, U.S. District Court Judge J. P. Boulee, a Trump appointee, enjoined one part of SB 202, the bill passed earlier this year that voting rights advocates fiercely opposed. But the judge declined to enjoin four other provisions of that bill. Here is the 39-page order in Coalition for Good Governance v Kemp, n.d., 1:21cv-2070.
The enjoined law, the “Photography Rules”, ban the use of photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices to photograph or record the face of an electronic ballot marker while a ballot is being voted or while an elector’s votes are displayed on such electronic ballot marker.”
The judge declined to enjoin these other parts of the law: (1) the Observation Rule, which prohibits a person from intentionally observing an elector while casting a ballot in a manner that would allow such person to see for whom or what the elector is voting; (2) the Communication Rule, which prevents election observers from telling anyone else how a voter voted; (3) the Tally Rules, which prevents observers from tallying or estimating the number of absentee ballots that have arrived; (4) most important, the Ballot Application Rule, which says that an application for an absentee ballot must be sent in at least eleven days before the election.
There are several other pending lawsuits against SB 202 that deal with other parts of the law.
The L.A. Progressive has this op-ed, advocating that California voters vote for Dan Kapelovitz for Governor on the second half of the recall ballot. Kapelovitz co-authored this op-ed, along with Mike Feinstein. Kapelovitz is one of the two Greens on the recall ballot.
