New York Governor Andrew Cuomo still hasn’t signed A8176, which sets the rules for the 2020 presidential primaries and puts them in April. According to this story, he may veto the bill. Then he would hope the legislature would pass a new bill, setting a February presidential primary.
As previously reported, a Third Circuit en banc panel already agreed with lower court rulings striking down a Delaware law that requires judges on most state courts to be registered members of one or the other of the two largest parties. The case had been won by an independent voter who wanted to become a state judge. UPDATE: this post is not accurate, and a cert petition has been filed, called Governor of Delaware v James R. Adams.
Although Delaware asked the U.S. Supreme Court for additional time to file a cert petition, and received additional time, the new due date for Delaware was September 4, 2019, which was yesterday. It appears that the cert petition did not get filed by the deadline. The attorney who had asked for more time is no longer at the phone number that he gave to the court when he asked for more time, so it is not easy to find out from him why no cert petition was filed.
Maine Governor Janet Mills must decide whether to let ranked choice voting apply to the presidential primary and the presidential general election by midnight, Friday night, September 6. The bill is LD 1083. If the bill becomes law, Maine will be the first state in history to use ranked choice voting for a presidential election in November.
Mills is a Democrat, and generally Maine Democratic politicians support ranked choice voting. But she may be bothered by the complicated interplay of ranked choice voting in the Democratic presidential primary, and the fact that Democratic rules already provide proportional delegates to candidates who receive at least 15% of the popular vote.
On September 3, California Senate Bill 696 was amended to be even more severe. This is the bill that requires the American Independent Party to choose a new name that doesn’t include the words “independent” or “independence”. As amended, the bill requires the party to choose a new name by October 29, 2019, or it would be disqualified the following day. Here is the amended bill.
On September 1, U.S. District Court Judge Xavier Rodriguez, a Bush Jr. appointee, dismissed the lawsuit San Antonio Firefighters v City of San Antonio, w.d., 5:18cv-745. The case had been filed by the union because it was circulating an initiative petition and the city barred petitioners from the grounds of the city’s senior centers, and also barred them from most of the area around public libraries. The opinion says those areas are not traditional public fora. Here is the 26-page opinion.
