The Centrist Project hopes to elect some independent candidates to congress and state legislatures, and especially hopes these independents will win in legislative bodies that are closely balanced between the Republican and Democratic members. Political scientist Seth Masket comments here about that strategy.
George Skelton, veteran politics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, here bemoans the fact that young people, especially Hispanics and blacks, have far lower turnout rates nowadays in midterm years than in the past. Skelton has been vociferously in favor of the top-two system in California, ever since it was first proposed in 2004.
He does not mention the idea that top-two is one reason why California midterm elections are so boring. In 2014, two very interesting gubernatorial candidates filed, but were kept off the general election ballot because of the top-two system. One was Green Party member Luis Rodriguez, who had gone from being a gang member and drug addict, to one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers. During 2014 he was poet laurate of Los Angeles. He has published 15 books and won many literary and civic awards.
The other was Cindy Sheehan, famous for having set up “Camp Casey” outside President George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas, summer white house. She also filed, as a Peace & Freedom Party member, but like Rodriguez, was kept out of the general election campaign season.
The Delaware legislature has adjourned for the year. The only election law bill that passed this year is HB 47. It removes the requirement that an application for an absentee ballot be notarized. Delaware had been the only state in the nation that required such applications to be notarized.
The bill to move the non-presidential primary from September to April did not pass this year, but Delaware has two-year legislative sessions, so it could still pass in 2018.
Mike Becallo, an elected town councilor in Cicero, New York, has changed his registration from Republican to Libertarian. See this story. The office is partisan. Cicero has a population of 31,632 and is in Onondaga County, the same county as Syracuse.
On June 30, Vinz Koller filed this brief in Koller v Padilla, the lawsuit against the California law that tells presidential electors they must vote for the candidate who received the most popular votes in the state.
