As of Sunday morning, February 7, the website of the New York State Board of Elections still doesn’t show any election returns for the 22nd U.S. House district. The candidates are listed with zero votes, and that race is still annotated, “litigation pending.”
According to this news story, the California gubernatorial recall petition now has 1,400,000 signatures. The requirement is 1,495,709 signatures, due March 17, 2021.
On February 3, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Lovell refused to reconsider his earlier ruling in Pierce v Jacobsen, 6:18cv-63. This is the case over Montana’s ban on out-of-state circulators for initiatives. See the eight-page order here. The order begins by again saying that in 2006, some Montana out-of-state circulators were convicted of petitioning fraud. This incident, which was already discussed at great length in the original opinion, has nothing to do with the points raised in the request for rehearing. Presumably the plaintiffs will now ask the Ninth Circuit to reverse the decision. The Ninth Circuit already struck down bans on out-of-state circulators in 2008 in an Arizona case, Nader v Brewer.
The U.S. Supreme Court has assigned a case number to Thompson v De Wine, 20-1072. This is the Ohio case on whether election officials should have eased ballot access for initiatives during the health crisis. The state’s response is due March 8.
There are now at least three ballot access cases pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. Besides Thompson, there is Kopitke v Bell, 20-897, on the North Carolina independent presidential petition deadline of March 3 of an election year; and there is De La Fuente v Simon, 20-612, over Minnesota’s law letting political parties decide which candidates may appear on that party’s presidential primary ballot.
Also, there is Level the Playing Field v FEC, 20-649, which is not a ballot access case, but which concerns entry into general election presidential debates.
On February 5, the Virginia House Election Administration Subcommittee tabled HB 2278. It would have provided that voter registration forms ask applicants if they wish to register into any particular party. The bill was sponsored by five Republican Delegates. Virginia has a Democratic majority in each house of its legislature.
The bill was flawed, because it did not deal with whether voters could register into an unqualified party. Virginia’s definition of a party is so strict that only the Democratic and Republican Parties have met that definition, in the period since 1997. Virginia is one of only three states that has not had any ballot-qualified third parties in the 21st century. The others are New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Also Georgia has only had a ballot-qualified minor party that was ballot-qualified for statewide office, not all partisan office.
If the bill had passed, independents would still have been allowed to vote in any party’s primary, but registered Democrats could not vote in the Republican primary, and vice versa.
