On September 18, the Alaska Supreme Court verbally announced a decision after the hearing in Galvin v State. The Alaska ballots have already been printed without the partisan labels for the nominees of unqualified parties, and without the partisan affiliation of major party nominees who are not members of the party that nominated them. The 2020 ballot does not follow state law, and injures certain candidates. But those ballots will be used anyway. See this story.
On September 18, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
No member of the current court was more favorable to minor party and independent candidates and voters than she was. She wrote Buckley v American Constitutional Law Foundation, which struck down state laws requiring petitioners to be registered voters.
Also, in the last Supreme Court decision that discussed minor parties, Clingman v Beaver (2005), she joined the dissent of Justice John Paul Stevens which said, “There is over a century of experience demonstrating that the two major parties are fully capable of maintaining their own positions of dominance in the political marketplace without any special assistance from the state governments they dominate.”
According to this story, the Alaska Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the ballot labels case on Friday afternoon, September 18. That detail is at the very end of the story.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. House member Jamie Raskin, have this op-ed in the Boston Globe, advocating that Massachusetts voters pass the initiative to use ranked choice voting. Raskin is a Maryland Congressman. Maryland doesn’t have the statewide initiative process, but Massachusetts does.
No one knows how many votes will be cast for president in any state in November 2020. But if one uses the November 2016 vote as a substitute, one can calculate that 72.8% of the voters will use a ballot that has Howie Hawkins’ name. Without the three Democratic Party challenges to him in Montana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, his percentage would have been 79.8%.
The 2020 percentage for him is better than it was for the Green presidential nominee in 1996, 2004, and 2008.
