On December 1, the Alaskan Independence Party filed a lawsuit against the top-four primary, the initiative that passed earlier this month. The lawsuit is filed in state court and depends on the Alaska constitution. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 2005 in State of Alaska v Green Party that the Alaska constitution gives greater protection to political parties than the U.S. Constitution does. In the 2005 case, the state had required separate primary ballots for each qualified party. The Green Party and the Republican Moderate Party sued over that law, and said they had a right to participate in a blanket primary, in which members of each of those two parties would appear on a joint primary ballot. They won the case, even though when they filed the case, in 2003, they were no longer qualified parties. See this story about the new lawsuit.

The Alaskan Independence Party wants to nominate its own candidates. The top-four primary permits individuals who have no support from the party to run for office with the party’s label, and the party thus loses control over its name on ballots. UPDATE: here is the Complaint.

On December 1, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit directly with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking that hundreds of thousands of votes be excluded from the official count. See this story. The lawsuit does not allege any fraudulent activity, but says that many votes were cast in a way that violates state law.

Open Primaries is an organization based in New York city that is dedicated to depriving political parties of their core function, the right to nominate candidates. Open Primaries supports top-two and top-four initiatives, in which candidates qualify for the general election ballot based on their popularity in a preceding primary, rather than by winning the nomination of a party.

On November 29, 2020, Open Primaries released a 60-page report, titled “The Next Great Migration, the Rise of Independent Voters.” The thesis of the report is “Independent voters are the fastest growing segment of the electorate.” It uses registration data to make this point. However, the report’s registration data for each state is out-of-date. In no case does the report have any data more recent than May 2020.

Between February 2020 and October 2020, the fastest growing segment of the electorate was the Libertarian Party, if one uses percentages to measure growth. Libertarian registration went up 43,027 voters between February and October, for a 7.06% rise. The Republican Party gained 1,757,462 voters during the same period, growth of 5.28%. The Democratic Party gained 1,390,132 voters, up 3.04%. Independents only grew by 166,577, which was only up .50%.

It is certainly true that independent voters greatly increased their share of the registration between 2005 and 2020. The Report emphasizes how things have changed since 2005. The Report lists the states that now ask about party choice on voter registration forms, but it does does not include Arkansas on that list. Arkansas does ask about party registration. If the Report had recognized Arkansas as a state with party registration, that would have bolstered the Report’s thesis, because a large majority of Arkansas voters are registered independents.

Open Primaries was founded by leaders of the New Alliance Party, which dissolved itself in 1994 and helped create the Patriot Party. After the Reform Party was founded in September 1995, the Patriot Party entered the Reform Party. Its activists supported Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. After the 2000 election, they left the Reform Party and created the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, and then they formed Open Primaries.