On June 12, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Steven M. Gold declared that New York state’s ban on out-of-state circulators is unconstitutional. This is not surprising, because on May 18 he had enjoined the restriction. Free Libertarian Party v Spano, e.d., 1:16cv-3054.

However, in his order of June 12, he said New York will be allowed to continue to enforce the ban until November 7, 2018, because it would be too difficult for the state to come up with new procedures in a matter of weeks. The petitioning period for general election petitions starts June 19 (for federal office).

George Skelton, the veteran Sacramento news correspondent covering California state government, here writes, “Give California’s top-two primary some more time, and if it doesn’t get better, junk it.” This is significant, because since 2004, Skelton has been a strong supporter of the system.

The last part of his column mentions alternatives, but he seems not to know that his idea to declare a winner in June, for a candidate who gets at least 50%, is not legally permitted, at least for Congressional elections. Federal law, since 1872, has told the states to hold congressional elections in all districts in November of even-numbered years. That is why Louisiana stopped using top-two. The U.S.Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s law in 1997 in Foster v Love, because Louisiana was letting candidates win in September. Now Louisiana doesn’t have primaries (except presidential primaries). It just has a general election in November and if no one gets 50%, a runoff in December. For state office, the same principle applies, except that the election is in October of the odd years just before presidential election years.

Ted Rall, an author and editorial cartoonist, has this opinion piece defending political parties and partisanship, and criticizing top-two systems. Some of his points have support in the political science research conducted by Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov, set forth in their 2016 book, “Independent Politics.” They find that most people who say they are independent voters are really strongly committed to either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but they sense that nowadays, identifying oneself as a partisan is socially disadvantgeous, so they say they are independents. Thanks to several people for the link to the Rall column.