On September 13, the Michigan legislature passed HB 4892. It allows candidates to get on the ballot in local 2017 elections, in instances when election officials had given erroneous information to the candidates about the deadline. No one voted against the bill in the Senate.
On the evening of September 12, the U.S. Supreme Court countermanded two rulings of lower federal courts in Texas, and said that Texas need not draw new districts in time for the 2018 election. One case involved U.S. House districts; the other state house districts. See this Scotusblog post. The vote was 5-4.
This summary in the Gotham Gazette, about the September 12 New York city primary results for Mayor and other city office, says the turnout was quite poor, and that Sal Albanese appears to have won the Reform Party primary.
On September 13, Nebraska State Senator Bob Krist said he will run for Governor of Nebraska in 2018 on a “Unity ticket”, which seems to say he will form a new party called the Unity Party. See this story. However, his campaign says he hasn’t decided yet on which petition route he will use, new party or independent.
The new party petition route is 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, which is 4,880 signatures. The independent petition is well over 110,000 (10% of the number of registered voters in 2018), and is clearly unconstitutional.
The Eighth Circuit will hear Libertarian Party of Arkansas v Martin, 16-3794, on Wednesday, September 20. On September 12, the panel of judges assigned to the case sent a letter to both sides, asking them to be prepared to discuss whether the case is moot or not. That is because, after the Libertarian Party won the case in U.S. District Court, the legislature amended the law to substantially fix the problem that the Libertarians had complained about.
The issue in the original case was whether it is constitutional to force newly-qualifying parties to choose all their non-presidential nominees (in a convention) months before the major parties hold their primaries. After the state lost the case in U.S. District Court, the legislature liberalized the convention deadline, by moving it to primary day.
Even though the legislature removed the problem that had caused the lawsuit, the state continues to appeal the decision. No other state in the history of constitutional ballot access litigation had ever continued to appeal a lower court decision, after the legislature amended the law in the direction desired by the plaintiffs. Thus there is no precedent on ballot access mootness for this type of situation.
