The U.S. Supreme Court still has twelve cases in which it has not yet issued opinions. The Court has not yet said whether all opinions will all be released on Monday, June 24. It is possible that on June 24, some opinions will not be released, and the Court will set an additional day for opinions beyond June 24. The two gerrymander cases are from Maryland and North Carolina.
On June 20, the New York legislature passed A8228. It says voters may switch parties as late as February 14 of an election year, and vote in the primary of their new party. Existing law requires party switchers to have switched the year before the election.
On June 19, the Pennsylvania State Government Committee passed SB 421, which abolishes the straight-ticket device.
An identical bill, HB 282, is pending in the House, but it hasn’t moved yet.
California State Senator Tom Umberg, chair of the Senate Elections Committee, is about to amend one of his bills to make it illegal for any party to have the word “Independent” in its name. The deadline for introducing new bills in California has passed, so Umberg will amend SB 696 to include that idea. See this story.
The American Independent Party, which has been ballot-qualified continuously starting in 1968, would be given the opportunity to choose a new name.
In the past, California also had the Independent Progressive Party on the ballot 1948-1954, and the Independence Party 1906-1910. The bill’s wording is not yet available publicly, but presumably it won’t ban “Independence”, and conceivably, if the bill passes and is not invalidated in court, the AIP could change its name to “American Independence”.
COFOE will hold a board meeting on Sunday, August 18, at 1:30 pm, at the law office of James Clymer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. COFOE was established in 1985. It is a very loose coalition of most of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, plus groups that care about how minor parties and independent candidates are treated in the United States.
COFOE’s latest project has been filing an amicus curiae case in the U.S. Supreme Court in Hall v Merrill, the only ballot access case now pending in that court. It arose in Alabama, case number 18-1362.
