Chicago holds a non-partisan election for Mayor, City Clerk, Treasurer, and Alderman, on February 26. Here is the candidate list from the Chicago Board of Elections. There will apparently be between twelve and fourteen candidates on the ballot for Mayor. Candidates for a citywide office need 12,500 signatures and are subject to having their petitions challenged. Some challenges are still not adjudicated.
On January 23, a hearing was held in U.S. District Court in Maryland, in Johnston v Lamone, the lawsuit over the Maryland definition of “political party”. At the hearing, the state agreed to leave the Libertarian Party as a choice on the voter registration forms until the lawsuit gets a ruling, which will be quite soon. There will be oral argument on Thursday, January 31, at 2:30 p.m. The issue is whether it the state’s definition of a qualified party is constitutional, as applied to a party like the Libertarian Party, which has over 10,000 registered voters yet which is not a qualified party.
The party argues that it is not rational to force it to obtain 10,000 signatures on a petition to restore its party status, when it has 22,464 registered members. It seems that if the party has that many registered voters, there are more than 10,000 voters in the state who want it on the ballot, so the petition would be meaningless. The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Blake, a Clinton appointee. There really are no cases on point.
The Green Party has 9,285 registered members. It is not on the ballot either, but if the Libertarians prevail in court, and the Green Party increases its registration to at least 10,000, that would help the Green Party also.
Alaska Representative Ivy Spohnholz has agreed to introduce a bill to ease the definition of “political party.” Currently it is a group that has registration membership equal to 3% of the last vote cast, or a group that polled 3% of the vote for the top non-presidential office at the last election.
As a registration requirement, Alaska has the nation’s most severe registration test, unless one counts the Pennsylvania law that puts a party on the ballot if it has 15% of the statewide registration.
The only qualified parties in Alaska now are the Republican, Democratic, and Alaskan Independence Party. The Alaskan Independence Party had no nominees for any office in 2018, yet it easily remains on the ballot because it has such high registration.
On January 22, the Wyoming Senate Corporations, Elections, and Political Subdivisions Committee passed SF 65. This bill is titled “Open Ranked Choice Elections.” The Committee also directed that it be amended, but the amendment isn’t on the legislature’s web page yet, probably because it hasn’t been written. The vote was 3-2. All five voters were from Republicans. Voting in favor were Cale Case, Tara Nethercott, and Wendy Schuler. Voting against were Charles Scott and Bill Landen.
The same Committee defeated SF 32, which would have prohibited voters from changing parties after May 1 of an election year, and thus would have ended the provision that lets a primary voter decide on primary day which party to join.
A few news stories describe the hearing in the Washington State Supreme Court yesterday on whether presidential electors have freedom to vote for any qualified person, but the stories say nothing about how the justices reacted to the arguments. Here is one story.
