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).

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.

The Third Circuit hears Wilmuth v Guadagno, 17-1925, on Tuesday, January 23. The issue is New Jersey’s ban on out-of-state circulators for primary election petitions. The lower court had upheld the ban, on the theory that the Democratic and Republican Parties (the only parties that hold primaries in New Jersey) don’t want out-of-state circulators for candidates in their primaries. However, neither major party has ever expressed an opinion; the U.S. District Court just assumed that the major parties don’t want out-of-state circulators.

The plaintiff, Shawn Wilmuth, wanted to circulate presidential primary petitions for Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primary. He says he is a Republican himself, but because he lives in Michigan, he was not permitted to work in New Jersey.

The three judges will be Thomas Hardiman (a Bush Jr. appointee), and Thomas Vanaskie and Patty Shwartz (Obama appointees).