On July 26, the Illinois State Appellate Court ruled that objections to the petition of Bill Redpath, Libertarian nominee for U.S. House in 2020 in the Sixth District, were not meritorious. Bixler v Illinois State Board of Elections, 2021 200458-U. Here is the 12-page order.
On July 30, supporters of the California gubernatorial recall filed a lawsuit to censor Governor Gavin Newsom’s statements in the Voters Handbook. Heatlie v Weber, Sacramento Superior Court. Here is the Petition for Mandate. Governor Newsom’s statement says, in part, “Vote No on the recall of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to stop the Republican takeover of our state.”
The lawsuit proponents want to eliminate the word “Democratic” in Newsom’s statement. The lawsuit also claims that some of the other sentences in Newsom’s statement are “false or misleading”. For example, his statement says, “The recall is an attempt by national Republicans and Trump supporters to force an election and grab power in California.”
On July 30, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu vetoed HB 98, which would have moved the independent candidate petition deadline from August to July, and moved the deadline for their declarations of candidacy from June to May. See this story. The bill also moved the non-presidential primary from September to August.
U.S. District Court Judge Jill Otake will hear Reeves v Nago, 1:20cv-433 (U.S. District Court in Hawaii), on August 13 at 9 a.m. This is the case over voting rights for U.S. citizens who move to Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Under federal law, they can’t vote, yet if they had moved to a foreign country, they could have continued to vote absentee in the states in which they had lived before they moved abroad.
On July 29, an Alaska state trial court upheld the top-four initiative passed by the voters in 2020. Kohlhaas v State, 3AN-20-9532. The 20-page decision did not even mention the strongest precedent against the system, Green Party of Alaska v State. In the Green Party case, the State Supreme Court ruled that the Alaska constitution gives more protection for freedom of association for political parties than the U.S. Constitution does. The Green Party decision said that if the Green Party and the Republican Moderate Party wanted to jointly participate in a blanket primary, they may do that, even though the legislature had abolished the blanket primary.
In the top-four case, the Alaskan Independence Party had said that it doesn’t want to participate in the top-four system, but the judge ruled that it must.
