On January 19, the Bernie Sanders supporters who are suing the Democratic National Committee filed their opening brief in Wilding v Democratic National Committee, 17-14194, in the Eleventh Circuit. The 40-page brief lays out the basic argument, which says that persons who donated to the Democratic Party have standing to complain that the party did not observe its own rules, requiring the party to remain neutral in the race for the presidential nomination.
On January 19, attorneys for the Colorado Secretary of State filed this nine-page brief in Baca v Colorado Department of State, 1:17cv-1937. This is the lawsuit over whether presidential electors have a right to vote for anyone for president who meets the constitutional qualifications, or whether they must vote for the person who received the most popular votes in their state.
Colorado claims the plaintiffs don’t have standing, but to support that contention, it relies on precedents that say local governments can’t sue their state governments, and state legislators can’t sue state governments, in federal court.
Colorado also claims that the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804, was intended to make sure that the electors “carried out the desires of the people.” This seems obviously incorrect, because in the 1804 presidential election, the first election conducted under the Twelfth Amendment, six states did not have a popular vote to choose presidential electors (out of 17 states in the union at the time).
On January 19, a 3-judge U.S. District Court issued a 92-page opinion in Covington v State, m.d., 1:15cv-399. It orders the state to use districts drawn up by the court’s expert, for state legislature. The invalidated districts had already been held to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
This case has nothing to do with the North Carolina case over whether the U.S. House districts constitute an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. That case, Rucho v Common Cause, had resulted in a recent U.S. District Court order striking down the U.S. House districts. But on January 18, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay in that case (17A745), so the current U.S. House districts will be used in 2018. Justices Ruth Ginsburg and Elena Sotomayor voted to deny the stay. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
The Florida Constitution Revision Commission has the power to put proposed constitutional changes on the November 2018 ballot. According to this story, the part of the Commission that studies election law changes is recommending one change in Florida’s closed primary. Currently if members of only one party file for a particular partisan office, then that party’s primary for that office is open to all registered voters. The change would say an election is deemed to have candidates from only one party, even if there is a write-in candidate in the general election for that particular office.
Florida has a huge proportion of partisan races with candidates from only one party. That is because Florida has such severe filing fees, twice as high as any other state’s filing fees (6% of the office annual salary; Georgia is second with 3% of the salary). In many of these one-party elections, someone who is in league with the party will file as a write-in candidate, thus closing the primary for that particular office to only party members. Public hostility toward this trick is motivating the Revision Commission to change the law to ignore write-ins for the purpose of determining whether a primary is closed or open.
According to the story, the Commission is not recommending converting all Florida primaries from closed to semi-closed. A semi-closed primary is one in which independent voters can choose a primary ballot.
On January 19, a Texas lower state court put incumbent Judge Teresa Hawthorne back on the Democratic primary ballot. The party had removed her because she didn’t fill in all the blanks on her declaration of candidacy. And in the blank for “party” she wrote the date of the election. See this story.
