On February 14, South Dakota HB 1259 was withdrawn by its sponsors. It would have changed nomination procedures for South Dakota statewide state elective positions other than Governor. Current law says all qualified parties, large and small alike, choose nominees for the executive statewide posts (other than Governor) in conventions in the summer. The bill would have said they should all be nominated by primary. Thanks to Lori Stacey for this news.
The New York Times has this article, describing how California’s top-two system has not changed California politics very much since it was put into effect, but showing how it is worrying Democrats in certain U.S. House races in 2018.
The paper says some variant of the system is in effect in four states. This is not accurate. Proponents of top-two constantly say that their system exists in Nebraska and Louisiana. But Louisiana abolished primaries (except presidential primaries) and simply has a general election in November in which no candidate is barred from the ballot. Nebraska has closed primaries for state executive office and county partisan office; semi-closed primaries for federal office; and a non-partisan system for the legislature. None of Nebraska’s characteristics matches a top-two system, which includes party labels on the ballot but abolishes party nominees.
Craig O’Dear has declared his independent candidacy for U.S. Senate in Missouri. See this story. He is backed by the Centrist Project. He will need 10,000 signatures, due by July 30. Missouri has not had an independent on the ballot for U.S. Senate in many years. Thanks to Ken Bush for the link.
According to this Buzzfeed article, persons close to Ohio Governor John Kasich say he is considering running for president in 2020, either as a Republican or as an independent. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
On February 13, the Eighth Circuit heard Abdurrahman v Dayton, 16-4551. The issue is the Minnesota law saying if a presidential elector votes in the electoral college for someone who did not get the most popular votes, then he or she is deemed to have resigned, and will be replaced by the other electors.
The plaintiff, a Democratic presidential elector in 2016, voted for Bernie Sanders for president in the electoral college meeting in December. The Secretary of State then removed him as an elector, so his electoral vote was never counted. The U.S. District Court then ruled in favor of the state and dismissed the case, before any proceedings over the constitutionality of the law had occurred. The Eighth Circuit must now decide whether the case was dismissed too soon.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said that ballot access cases are not moot just because the election is over, because there isn’t time to decide many cases between the filing of the lawsuit and the date of the election. The main question is whether cases over disobedient presidential electors are also exempt from the mootness problem. The state argued that the elector should have filed his lawsuit in August, when the Democratic Party appointed him an elector. The state also says that election law cases that are capable of repetition, and therefore not moot, only cover instances when the plaintiff expects to personally suffer the same problem in the future. However, in Richardson v Ramirez, 418 US 24, the U.S. Supreme Court said on page 35 that in Moore v Ogilvie (the first ballot access case that got an exception from mootness) the plaintiffs did not allege they were expecting to run again. No one mentioned Moore v Ogilvie in the Eighth Circuit oral argument.
Because the entire 30 minutes was devoted to procedure, there wasn’t any substantive discussion of the constitutional rights of presidential electors, which of course would have been far more interesting. Listen to the 30-minute oral argument at this link. The Judges are Lavenski Smith (a Bush Jr. appointee), Diana E. Murphy (a Clinton appointee), and Steven Colloton (a Bush Jr. appointee).
