Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s choice for the U.S. Supreme Court, has had few voting rights cases. In Libertarian Party v District of Columbia Board of Elections, he voted to uphold the action of D.C. election officials who refused to count write-in votes for Bob Barr, 2008 Libertarian nominee, even though Barr was a declared write-in candidate. The decision, signed by Kavanaugh, said it was good enough that D.C. counted the total number of all write-ins cast for President, without specifying how many were received by any particular candidate. Barr was the only declared write-in presidential candidate in D.C. that year.

Judge Kavanaugh has also generally upheld campaign finance restrictions. Here is a summary of his involvement in those cases, by the Institute for Free Speech.

On July 9, a Montana state trial court removed the Green Party from the ballot, finding that it was 43 signatures short of the number needed. The state requires 5,000 valid signatures, and all sides agree that this requirement was met. But there must also be approximately 130 signatures from each of one-third of the legislative districts. The court found that nine signatures are invalid because the signer didn’t put the date; five signatures are invalid because the signer only signed, but didn’t also print; and invalidated six signatures that the state had thought were valid because, the judge wrote, the person who signed was not the person who was listed as the registered voter.

Here is the 19-page opinion in Larson v State of Montana, DDV-2018-2945. The Green Party has the option of now bringing a federal lawsuit, arguing that the March 15 petition deadline for new party petitions is unconstitutionally early. Montana has harsh winters, and there is no doubt that the party would have had enough valid signatures if the deadline had not been so early. The party collected additional signatures after the deadline had passed, and tried to submit them, but they were refused. If they had been accepted, the distribution requirement would have been met and the party would be on the ballot.

The Green Party already had a primary in Montana on June 5, and the votes were counted, so there is no problem identifying who the Green Party nominees are this year.

Similar early deadlines for new parties have been declared unconstitutional in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California (for purposes of the presidential election), Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah (in special elections).

The supporters of Approval Voting appear to have qualified an initiative in Lane County, Oregon. If the county initiative has enough valid signatures and is otherwise approved for the ballot, Lane County voters would vote on the idea in November 2018.

This type of Approval Voting is new. First, the voters assign a numerical value (registering how much they like the candidate) to each candidate listed on the ballot. It is not necessary for the voter to do this for each candidate listed. Then, the sum total for each candidate is calculated. The vote for the two highest candidates is re-examined, and the number of voters (among the voters who assigned a score to each candidate) who preferred one of the two candidates, relative to the other candidate, is checked. Of the two strongest candidates, the one preferred by the most voters wins.

In such a system, if a voter assigns an equal score to each of the two top candidates, then his or her vote is discounted as an abstention. This feature of the system motivates voters to give sincere scores. This new system is termed by its inventors “Star voting”, where “Star” means “Score-then-automatic-runoff.” Here is a short video about the system, from http://Equal. Vote. Thanks to Independent Voters Network for the link.

This system, along with ranked choice voting, has the virtue of being held in the general election, when public interest is highest. It allows the primary to be eliminated, which also saves election administration cost.