The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition has raised $20,000,000 to pay court costs and fines for approximately 32,000 individuals may qualify to register to vote. See this story. Most of the money came from Mike Bloomberg. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
The New York Times has published a long article about the Green Party. The theme is that the Republican Party in the past and currently has helped in a few states to get the Green Party on the ballot.
The story is myopic. The authors take it for granted that it is difficult for a party like the Green Party to get on the ballot. The authors should ask the big question: why should be difficult for a party with some measure of support to need the support of a more powerful organization to get on the ballot? The Green Party has elected state legislators in three states, and it polled 1,457,217 votes for president in 2016, even though it was not on the ballot in six states.
In Great Britain and Canada, two countries that are very similar to the United States, ballot access is so easy that the Green Party regularly qualifies for the ballot in virtually every district, for Parliament. If it is true that the U.S. Green Party’s presence in the campaign injures the Democratic Party, then it is probably also true that the Green Party’s existence in Canada injures the Liberal Party, and that the Green Party in Great Britain injures the Labour Party. But no one in either Canada or Great Britain ever even imagines having an election law that would keep the Green Party off the ballot.
The Times also ignores the evidence that left parties and candidates in the U.S. do not injure the Democratic Party. The Times makes no mention of Political Science/Pollster Sam Lubell’s findings that the Progressive Party of 1948, which ran former vice-president Henry Wallace for president, helped Harry Truman to defeat Thomas Dewey. The Times makes no mention of the findings of four major pollsters in 2004 that a slight majority of Nader voters said, if Nader were removed from the ballot, they would vote for George W. Bush, not John Kerry. See the Washington Post of October 22, 2004, front page.
The Times also says that 2020 Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins is on the ballot in 28 states. Actually he is on in 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, and also he is on the Guam advisory ballot.
On September 22, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Republican-backed referendum petition on ranked choice voting for president did not have enough valid signatures. Therefore, the voters will not vote again on whether to use ranked choice voting, and the existing law, requiring the presidential portion of the November ballot to use ranked choice voting, will be in effect in November 2020. See this story.
The case is Jones v Dunlap, CUM-20-227. The vote is unanimous. Here is the 24-page opinion. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
The only reason the petition failed is that two of the circulators, who each collected a great many signatures, were not registered in their town of residence when they started to work on the petition. The Maine Supreme Court admits that in 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a Colorado law that required initiative petitioners to be registered voters. But it says in that case, 17% of the adult citizen-residents of Colorado were not registered to vote, whereas in Maine, only 4% are not registered. It says that in order to hold the Maine registration requirement unconstitutional, a great deal of evidence would be needed, and that such evidence does not exist in this case.
This Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, conducted by the Survey Center at the University of Georgia, shows the breakdown for President Trump, Joe Biden, and Jo Jorgensen, by age, race, education, income, sex, ideology, and party affiliation. Scroll down to the second page.
As previously reported, the Montana Green Party has been kept off the ballot in both 2018 and 2020, even though both years, the Secretary of State said the party petition had enough valid signatures and conducted a primary for the party. The party was removed both times after activism by Democrats. In 2018 the Democrats persuaded a state court that the party petition lacked enough valid signatures, contrary to the Secretary of State’s finding. In 2020, the party petition was not challenged, but Democrats got a list of the signers and persuaded about 600 of them to retract their signatures. Thus the petition was nullified, six months after it had been validated.
The Green Party filed a federal lawsuit in 2018 against the unequal distribution requirement. The law requires signatures from 34 of the 100 state house districts. Instead of requiring an equal number of signatures in these equal-population districts, the law irrationally requires as few as 55 signatures in some districts, but up to 150 in others. This violates a U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Moore v Ogilvie. Nevertheless, on March 20, 2020, a U.S. District Court upheld the unequal distribution requirement. That case is Montana Green Party v Stapleton, now pending in the Ninth Circuit, 20-35340. The briefs in that case will all be submitted by November 13, 2020, and a decision is likely in 2021.
There was also a federal case involving the 2020 events, Davis v Stapleton. That was filed by some Green Party nominees for congress and state office in August 2020, charging that it violates the rights of the party’s nominees, and also the rights of the 13,000 voters who signed the petition and who did not retract their signatures, to remove a party because some of the signers recanted. That case failed to get injunctive relief from all three levels of federal court, and the Green Party nominees voluntarily dismissed that case on September 15, 2020. In the U.S. Supreme Court, the party had requested relief from Justice Elena Kagan on September 11, but she had denied it on September 14 without asking for a response from the other side and without asking the other justices.
If the 2020 Green Party nominees had not dismissed their case, the Ninth Circuit would have eventually ruled on the constitutional due process issue. This had been a case of first impression. In all history, in all states, there had never before been an incident in which people who signed a petition to get a party on the ballot were permitted to remove their names months later, thus cancelling the party’s legal existence. We will get a decision on this point from the Montana Supreme Court, however. That court denied injunctive relief on August 19, 2020, and said it would explain its reasoning “in due course.” That opinion still hasn’t emerged.
