Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has issued an executive order that whenever election administrators buy new vote-counting machines, they must be machines with a paper audit trail. See this story. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
The Georgia Libertarian Party has nominated Martin Cowen for U.S. House, 13th district. There has not been any minor party on the ballot in a regularly-scheduled U.S. House election in Georgia since 1942. Cowen is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed last year against the ballot access law for U.S. House elections. See this story.
On February 5, the Kentucky legislature passed HB 157. The vote was unanimous in both chambers. It lets individuals give $5,000 to a minor party. The old law said individuals could give that much to a major party, but not to any other party. That policy was struck down last year in U.S. District Court in Shickel v Dilger. The state did not appeal.
On February 8, the Ninth Circuit heard Soltysik v Padilla, 16-55758. This is the case over the California law that says members of qualified parties may have the name of the party they are registered in on the ballot. But members of unqualified parties must have “party preference: none.” The plaintiff, Mimi Soltysik, is a registered Socialist and when he ran for the legislature in 2014, he wanted to have “party preference: Socialist” on the ballot, but that was not allowed because the Socialist Party is not ballot-qualified.
The hearing lasted 43 minutes. The state argued that if a party is not ballot-qualified, it is not a party. The judges seemed to all feel that this is false. Clearly virtually everyone has heard of the Socialist Party, which is recognized by the Federal Election Commission as one of the eight national committees in the U.S. Here is a link to the audio.
The judges wondered why the state couldn’t change the ballot label to “party preference: no qualified party.” Or they wondered why the state couldn’t put an asterisk next to the name of candidates who are members of unqualified parties, so that Soltysik could have put “party preference: Socialist*”, with the asterisk leading to a note on the ballot saying “* not a qualified party.”
The ACLU attorneys, who argued for Soltysik, pointed out that the California voter registration form asks all voters if they wish to indicate a party preference, and applicants are free to choose a qualified party or an unqualified party as their party preference. Therefore, the “party preference” applies to both types of parties on the voter registration form, yet not on the ballot, so that is contradictory.
Joel Searby, for the Centrist Project, has this article about the 2018 independent candidates who have announced so far. Searby was campaign manager for Evan McMullin, independent presidential candidate in November 2016 who got 731,733 votes. Thanks to IVN for the link.
