Matthew Yglesias cuts through the rind and gets to the melon with this post stating that the best answer to the gerrymandering problem is proportional representation.
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This month, the Georgia House Election Law Study Committee has been holding public hearings in various cities. Libertarian activist Sergio Ortega has spoken at each of these hearings, asking that the statewide petition for office other than president be reduced from approximately 75,000 signatures, to exactly 7,500 signatures. The existing law requires 7,500 for president and yet the ballot is not crowded. The legislators who have heard this idea seem receptive.
Before every presidential election, the two major parties try to influence the calendar of presidential primaries and caucuses for the upcoming election. The Democratic National Committee will meet August 25-27 in Minneapolis and will work on its hopes for the calendar. Of course, it is not easy for parties to influence the calendar, because government-administered presidential primary dates are set by state legislatures.
The No Labels Party is ballot-qualified in Arizona, and will have its first nominee for partisan office on an Arizona ballot in the special U.S. House election next month. That candidate is Richard Grayson. Grayson has this letter to the editor of the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in the state. Grayson criticizes the idea of changing the name of the party. The party’s state chairm Paul Johnson, has said he will ask the Secretary of State to change the name of the party to something else. Johnson hasn’t said what the new name would be.
On June 26, a Republican candidate for Mayor of Lyons Borough, in Berks County, filed a federal challenge to the Pennsylvania law that says no write-in candidate in a partisan primary can be nominated if the candidate receives fewer votes than the number of signatures that would have been required to get on the primary ballot for that office. Pugh v Berks County Board of Elections, e.d., 5:25cv-3267. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge John M. Gallagher, a Trump appointee.
At the May 2025 primary, no one filed to be on either the Republican nor the Democratic primary ballot for Mayor of Lyons Borough, a very small jurisdiction. Only 41 Republicans voted in the primary in Lyons Boroough. Six of them wrote in Brandon Pugh, the plaintiff. But because he would have needed ten signatures to get on the primary ballot, the law blocked him from being on the November 2025 ballot, even though he got more votes than anyone else running for the Republican nomination.
The brief points out that when a candidate’s name is printed on a primary ballot, whoever gets the most votes wins the nomination, regardless of how few votes are received. If Pugh doesn’t win his lawsuit, no name will be on the November ballot for Mayor of Lyons Boroough. The case is pending. Here is the plaintiff’s brief.
The law was upheld in 1967 in Pennsylvania state court. UPDATE: the Pennsylvania State Elections Department filed this amicus curiae brief, which points out that many states require a minimum number of votes in primaries. The brief is a useful reference for those interested in those laws.