The Gothamist has this article by Ross Barkan, pointing out that New York state courts have ruled three times that the state constitution does not allow the state to outlaw fusion, unless the state constitution is changed. The decisions of the highest state court on that subject were in 1910, 1911, and 1973.

A commission in New York has been empowered by the legislature to implement public funding of campaigns for state office, and also to ban fusion. But of course the commission can’t ban fusion if the state constitution guarantees fusion.

Alabama holds a special election on November 12, 2019, for State House district 42. The Libertarian Party submitted a petition to be included in this race. It needed 448 valid signatures. The party submitted 668 signatures. The Secretary of State then said the petition only has 429 valid signatures, so it is 19 short. However the party has been re-validating the petition, and has already found six more valid signatures that had erroneously been marked “invalid”. The party is only one-fifth of the way through the revalidation process, and is optimistic that it will find enough signatures to make the petition valid.

The Republican nominee is Van Smith; the Democratic nominee is Kenneth Allison; the Libertarian nominee is Doug Ward.

This story about Maine’s bill for ranked choice voting in presidential primaries says that if the bill becomes law, it won’t be easy to combine ranked choice voting with the national Democratic Party rules on apportioning votes. The national rules say any presidential candidate who gets at least 15% in a Democratic primary is entitled to a proportionate number of delegates to the national convention. Squaring that with ranked choice voting is a head-scratcher.