On November 6, 2018, the voters of Memphis overwhelmingly voted again in favor of Ranked Choice Voting. See this article at Falrvote.org.
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On November 21, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously upheld a state law that disqualifies petition signatures collected by certain kinds of petitioners. If the petition is challenged, and circulators are asked to appear at the hearing to testify, and they don’t show up, their signatures are invalid. Stanwitz v Reagan, cv-18-0222. Here is the 12-page opinion.
The case was filed by proponents of an statewide initiative concerning campaign finance. The proponents would have succeeded in getting their initiative on the ballot if the signatures of the no-show circulators had been counted. The proponents argued that election officials were capable of determining whether the initiative had enough valid signatures, without the testimony from the no-show circulators. But the Court rejected that argument. Circulators who have had felony convictions are not permitted to circulate in Arizona, and the Court said that it was necessary to have the circulators to appear, partly in order for the challengers to determine if the circulators had a prior felony conviction.
Democrats now control both houses of the New York legislature, for the first time in decades. There is talk that the New York legislature may pass a bill eliminating fusion. See this New York Post op-ed piece.
Democrats in the House will arrange that the first bill introduced in January will be HR 1, to change federal election laws. The bill will include public funding for congressional candidates; stop partisan gerrymandering; and provide for automatic voter registration. See this story.
Bill Gardner, New Hampshire Secretary of State, may lose his job. In New Hampshire, the legislature appoints the Secretary of State. Democrats have a majority in both houses. The Democratic caucus has endorsed Colin Van Ostern for the job. See this story.
Gardner has done more harm to ballot access than any other Secretary of State who is now in office. Under his influence, the New Hampshire legislature has steadily made ballot access worse and worse, with no changes for the better. Unfortunately the legislature always seems to do as he wishes. He initiated a bill to change the vote test for parties to remain on the ballot from 3% to 4%, which happened late in 1996. He also made the procedures for the party petition worse. Originally that very difficult party petition (3% of the last gubernatorial vote) could circulate at any time, but he had the law changed so that the petition cannot circulate during odd years. Also, originally, when a party did the party petition, it could then nominate by convention in August and choose any candidates who were members of the party. But he persuaded the legislature to require that candidates nominated at the convention must have filed a declaration of candidacy in June, before the party petition’s success might not even be known. This even applies to presidential candidates.
New Hampshire is one of a few states that still uses a party column ballot. Every time the Libertarian Party has managed to qualify as a party, he puts all the independent candidates in the same column that the Libertarians use. The heading is always, “Libertarian and Other Candidates.” It would be unthinkable for him to do that to the Republican or the Democratic column.
Even though the New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that the order of party columns must be random, he has not applied that principle of neutrality to order of candidates within each party column. In 2008, when two Libertarian presidential candidates qualified for the November ballot, Bob Barr and George Phillies, he arbitrarily listed Phillies above Barr in the “Other Candidates” column (the Libertarian Party didn’t have its own party column that year).
Gardner refuses to allow an unqualified party to use substitution for either President or Vice-President. Thus an unqualified party can’t begin to circulate its presidential petition until it knows the identity of its national ticket. Gardner has vigorously defended the state law that says only members of the two largest parties can be members of precinct officials.
Many bills to ease the New Hampshire ballot access laws have been introduced in the last 20 years. Gardner or his Assistant always testify against these bills. There have been bills to let voters sign for more than one candidate for a particular office, to ease the vote test, to let small qualified parties nominate by convention, and to ease the number of signatures for the party petition, but Gardner has opposed all of them, so they never pass.