Fox & Hounds Daily, an on-line California politics news source, has this piece by Michael Feinstein on why ranked choice voting would improve U.S. presidential elections. Thanks to Irv Sutley for the link.
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Nebraska Senators John McCollister and Adam Morfeld have introduced LB 1005. It would eliminate party nominations for congress and state executive office. Instead all candidates would run in the May primary, and then the top two candidates would run in November. There would be no party labels on the primary ballot, but there would be partisan labels on the general election ballot.
If this bill were to become law, it would be very difficult for a party to maintain its qualified status. Currently parties remain on the ballot either by polling 5% of the statewide vote for any office at either of the last two elections, or by having at least 10,000 registrations. But the bill would end party nominees, so the vote test, which is quite easy compared to the registration alternative, wouldn’t work any more.
The bill would have no effect on partisan county offices, nor president.
This New York Times story covers the efforts by some Republican activists in South Carolina to encourage Republicans to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. South Carolina has open primaries, so any voter can choose any party’s primary ballot.
Public Citizen has filed this amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Carney v Adams, 19-309, the case over Delaware’s exclusion of independent and minor party registrants from serving on most judicial posts. The Public Citizen brief properly points out that the lower courts were correct to invalidate the law, but they used the wrong analysis. The lower courts handled this case as a patronage case, but should have instead considered it a freedom of association case.
The CATO Institute has filed this amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Carney v Adams, 19-309. The brief makes an interesting analogy to the religious affiliation of U.S. Supreme Court justices. It points out that for decades, it was considered important that there be one Catholic on the U.S. Supreme Court, for balance; and also that there be one Jewish member. Footnote nine notes that President Dwight Eisenhower was not willing to appoint William J. Brennan to the “Catholic” seat until after he received assurance from Brennan’s priest that Brennan was a genuine Catholic. The point is that judicial appointments are sometimes made on the basis of not only party, but religion; yet it would be unthinkable for any law to single out two popular religions and limit judicial appointments only the individuals who were members of one of those two religions.