Now that a U.S. District Court has declined to freeze Michigan’s new procedure for choosing a redistricting commission, the Secretary of State is going ahead with the process. This article says the state has already chosen 250,000 people at random, and will send an application form asking if they want to serve. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
This Houston Chronicle story says Libertarian Party candidates for the legislature are more and more likely to poll a number of votes that is greater than the difference between the two major party candidates. However the article does not mention ranked choice voting. Thanks to Clifford Thies for the link.
On November 27, persons associated with the Democratic Party sued Minnesota over its law on the order of candidates on the general election in partisan races. That law, unique in the nation, says the nominees of the qualified parties should be listed first on the ballot, in reverse order of how many votes they received in the previous general election for all partisan office. Here is the Complaint, in Pavek v Simon, 0:19cv-3000.
Under the existing law, the nominees of the Legal Marijuana Now Party will be listed first on the November 2020 ballot, because it polled the fewest votes of the four ballot-qualified parties. Next will be the Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party; then the Republican Party; and finally the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Under their nominees will be the nominees of the unqualified parties, and any independent candidates. The case is assigned to U.S. District Magistrate David T. Schultz, a Trump appointee. Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news.
On November 26, Rocky De La Fuente sued Minnesota in federal court, over the law that gives the Republican Party exclusive control over which candidates may be listed on the party’s presidential primary ballot. De La Fuente v Simon, 0:19cv-2995. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge David Doty, a Reagan appointee. Here is the Complaint.
The case depends on the theory that the presidential primary ballot access law violates the U.S. Constitution, because it sets up a ballot access barrier that is not designed to help election administration. De La Fuente’s pending case in Georgia is similar.
If the proposal of the New York Campaign Finance Commission had been in effect in 2018, the only ballot-qualified parties would have been Democratic, Republican, and Conservative.
In that case, there are twelve legislative elections from 2018 that actually had a choice of candidates, but would have been one-candidate elections with the proposal in place. For the State Senate, they would have been these districts: 13, 16, 20, and 62. For Assembly, they would have been: districts 39, 40, 61, 62, 63, 76, 114, and 139.
