The Olean, New York Times Herald has this story about the pending lawsuit filed by the Libertarian and Green Parties over the new definition of a qualified parrty.
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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.
On November 25, three Republican candidates for presidential elector from Michigan filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that the Dominion vote-counting machines used in parts of Michigan switched 289,000 votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. King v Whitmer, 2:20cv-13134. The Complaint alleges that the machines were first used to help Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez win his elections. Here is the amended complaint, which was filed on November 29. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker, an Obama appointee.
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 However, the report’s registration data for each state is out-of-date.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.
The Libertarian Party lawsuit against certain Maine ballot access laws will have a trial in early March 2021. The issues are: (1) the January deadline for a new party to complete its registration drive and thereby become qualified; (2) the extremely difficult requirements for a member of a small qualified party to get on his or her party’s primary ballot; (3) the irrational law for a party to remain qualified, which requires more than twice as many registrants as the number to get on the ballot in the first place; (4) the law that erases all a party’s registrants when it goes off the ballot. Generally, across the country, when a party goes off the ballot, it retains its registered members.