The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Segovia v U.S., 17-1463, on June 7, 2018. This is the case from Illinois over voting rights for U.S. citizens who move out of Illinois to certain U.S. territories. If a citizen-resident of Illinois moves to American Samoa or the Northern Mariana Islands, he or she can continue to vote absentee in Illinois. Also if a citizen-resident of Illinois moves to a foreign country, he or she can also continue to vote in Illinois elections by absentee ballot.

But if an Illinois citizens-resident moves to Puerto Rico, Guam, or the U.S. Virgin Islands, that individual cannot continue to vote in Illinois elections. The lower courts had upheld this system.

The U.S. government has told the U.S. Supreme Court that it does not wish to file a response. Six law professors have filed an amicus, asking the Court to hear the case. They are Samuel Issacharoff, Joshua Douglas, Chad Flanders, Joseph Fishkin, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, and Ciara Torres-Spelliscy.

See this story, which says the U.S. District Court that is hearing the Maine Republican Party case against ranked choice voting for Republican primaries will issue an opinion early next week.

On May 21, the Republican Party of Maine filed this 9-page brief in Maine Republican Party v Dunlap, 1:18cv-179. The issue is whether the First Amendment’s Freedom of Association clause gives the party the ability to decide for itself whether it wants to use ranked choice voting in its own primaries or not.

The Republican Party says that whether a party uses ranked choice voting or not can change the outcome of the individual who wins the party’s primary, so it is a fundamental burden on the party to be told that it must used ranked choice voting. But then the brief mentions that in 1860, if Abraham Lincoln had not been the party’s presidential nominee, all of U.S. history would have been different. This is a strange example, because the Republican Party has always nominated its presidential candidates under ranked choice voting, in a sense. All major party presidential conventions in the United States have always held multiple votes until at least one candidate had a majority of the delegates (and the Democratic Party did so until a candidate got two-thirds of the delegate votes, through 1932).

The hearing in the case is Wednesday, May 23, in the afternoon.