On December 6, the Ohio Election Commission dismissed complaints from the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for Governor, over their exclusion from debates this year. See this story.
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Final Utah election returns show that Proposition Four, setting up an independent redistricting commission for U.S. House and state legislative boundaries, passed with 50.3% of the vote. The final tally is: yes 512,218; no 505,274.
The measure failed in 25 of Utah’s 29 counties. It passed only in Carbon, Grand, Salt Lake, and Summit Counties. Grand and Summit Counties are the most Democratic Party-supporting counties in the state. They are the only two counties that voted in favor of the 2018 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate (Jenny Wilson) against Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
The Fourth Circuit will hear Fitzgerald v Alcorn, 18-1111, on December 12, Wednesday, at 9:30 a.m. This is the case in which a unit of the Virginia Republican Party attacks the state law that says when a party has an incumbent running for re-election, he or she can dictate to the party whether to use a primary or a convention for that office.
On December 7, the Riverside County (California) finished the official vote count for the November 6, 2018 election. Libertarian Party member Jeff Hewitt, as expected, won for County Supervisor in the 5th district. Riverside County, like almost all California counties, only has five supervisors. The county has a population of 2,423,000 people, the eleventh largest county in the nation. The election is non-partisan, but Hewitt’s Libertarian Party membership was well-known.
The California Republican Party will choose a new state chair at its state convention in Sacramento, Feb. 22-24, 2019. Three candidates are running. One of them, Steve R. Frank, says he wants the California Republican Party to sue to overturn top-two. See this Politico story.
No federal court has ever upheld California’s top-two system. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Washington state’s top-two system does not violate freedom of association on its face, but it might as applied. That Supreme Court decision also said the Court was not deciding the ballot access issue.
A state court in California upheld the top-two system in Rubin v Bowen, but the decision of the State Court of Appeals is badly flawed, because the judges made three factual errors. (1) They said the purpose of the top-two system is to let independent voters vote in primaries. They did not know that the old California system in use 2001-2010 allowed independent voters to vote in all Democratic and Republican primaries for Congress and state office; (2) They said that California would be free to hold its general election in June and hold a run-off in November. They did not know about the 1997 unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in Foster v Love that federal law does not permit this; (3) they said that the U.S. Supreme Court had already upheld top-two in 2000 in California Democratic Party v Jones. They did not notice that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote California Democratic Party v Jones, and yet when the U.S. Supreme Court partially upheld the Washington top-two law in 2008, Scalia dissented and said it violates freedom of association on its face.