Virginia U.S. House member Don Beyer will re-introduce his Fair Representation Act next month. He has introduced it before. It requires multi-winner U.S. House districts, ranked choice voting for congressional elections, and independent redistricting commission in every state, for drawing U.S. House districts.
On April 22, the U.S. House passed HR 51, the bill to make almost all of the District of Columbia a state. The vote was completely party-line.
On April 21, the Salt Lake City city council voted to use ranked choice voting in future elections for city office. See this story.
On April 20, a U.S. District Court issued an opinion in Arsenault v Way, 3:16cv-1854, striking down the New Jersey residence requirement for petitioners who wish to circulate petitions for candidates running in primaries. Here is the 21-page decision. The case had been filed in 2016 when Rocky De La Fuente was running in Democratic presidential primaries. He needed 1,000 signatures of registered Democrats in order to get on the New Jersey Democratic presidential primary. He did not get on that ballot; the only candidates who appeared on that ballot were Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Originally the U.S. District Court had upheld the restriction, but then the Third Circuit had remanded it and said the lower court should have used the strict scrutiny test. Under that test, the law cannot survive unless the state can show that it has a compelling need for the restriction. The state tried to argue that the Democratic and Republican Parties would be harmed without the restriction, but the two major parties themselves never intervened in the case and the state produced no evidence that the parties would be harmed.
Ohio has partisan primaries for judicial offices, but in the general election there is no party label for judicial nominees. On April 21, the Ohio Senate passed SB 80. It says there should be partisan labels on general election ballots, starting in 2022, for State Supreme and State Appellate races. It passed the Senate on a party-line vote, with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed.
Ironically, some years ago the Ohio Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit to require party labels on the general election ballot. They lost that lawsuit, and now appear to have changed their mind.
