India has decided to set up a commission to study proportional representation. See this story. Thanks to Smythe Duval for the link.
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On August 20, the Libertarian Party national committee voted to help the Tennessee Libertarian Party get on the ballot for the 2018 election. This will be the first time the Libertarian Party has made a serious attempt to qualify as a party in Tennessee. The procedure, a petition signed by a number of voters equal to 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, is so difficult, no group has successfully used that procedure since 1968. In 1968 the American Party completed the petition, to place George Wallace on the ballot. Back in 1968 Tennessee didn’t permit independent presidential candidates, so Wallace was forced to do the party petition, which was then 5%.
Bills are pending in the Tennessee legislature to ease the procedure. Thanks to Independent Political Report for this news.
Dick Gregory, the last surviving presidential candidate from the November 1968 election, died on August 20. He was 84 and was living in Washington, D.C. He was the Freedom and Peace presidential nominee in 1968. Here is a major obituary from the Los Angeles Times. Thanks to Irv Sutley for the link.
On Friday, August 18, attorneys for the government of Texas asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the recent decision of a 3-judge U.S. District Court that the state must redraw some of its U.S. House district boundaries. Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news.
The Eighth Circuit will hear Libertarian Party of Arkansas v Martin, 16-3794, on Wednesday, September 20, at 9 a.m., in St. Louis. The Libertarian Party had won in the U.S. District Court, and the state is appealing.
The issue is the former law that said newly-qualifying parties (which nominate by convention) must choose all their non-presidential nominees in the year before the election, months before the major parties hold primaries to choose their nominees.
This government appeal is unprecedented. The Arkansas legislature already changed the law to conform to the U.S. District Court ruling, and the problem no longer exists. But the state still hopes to persuade the Eighth Circuit that the U.S. District Court decision was wrong. In 49 years of ballot access litigation in federal courts, there has never before been any state which kept appealing the decision even after that state’s legislature corrected the law that had been held unconstitutional.