On May 8, the California Assembly passed AB 22, which deletes an old law that says state employees can be fired if they are members of the Communist Party. Thanks to Libertarian Republic for this news. The vote was 41-30. The bill now goes to the State Senate. The author is Assemblymember Rob Banta (D-Oakland).
Even if this bill is signed into law, California will still have another law in the election code that says subversive parties may not be on the ballot.
On May 9, the Ohio State Appeals Court, 10th district, heard oral argument in Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, 16AP000496. This is the last remaining Libertarian Party ballot access case in Ohio. The party argues that the Ohio Constitution requires all qualified parties to nominate by primary, and that the 2013 ballot access law, which was responsible for keeping the party off the ballot in 2016, conflicts with the state constitution. That law says newly-qualifying parties do not have a primary.
Judge Julia Dorrian seemed concerned that preventing any qualified party from having its own primary violates the equal protection parts of the Ohio and U.S. Constitutions. Ohio voter registration forms do not ask applicants to choose a party. Instead Ohio law says a party’s members are the voters who choose that party’s primary ballot. So, under the current law, newly-qualifying parties don’t have any “members” in the legal sense, which damages them.
The Ohio Constitution says, “Article V, section 7. All nominations for elective state, district, county and municipal offices shall be made at direct primary elections or by petition as provided by law.”
The hearing lasted 40 minutes. The other two judges were G. Gary Tyack and Lisa Sadler. Ohio state court judges are elected in partisan elections, except that party labels do not appear on the general election ballot. Judges Dorrian and Tyack are Democrats; Judge Sadler is a Republican.
On April 27, Muhammad Abdurrahman filed his reply brief in the Eighth Circuit in Abdurrahman v Dayton, 16-4551. He is the 2016 Minnesota Democratic presidential elector who sued to overturn the Minnesota law that says presidential electors who vote in the electoral college for the “wrong” presidential candidate are deemed to no longer be an elector.
The U.S. District Court dismissed the case before Abdurrahman had even had a chance to make the case that the Minnesota law violates the U.S. Constitution. The issue in the Eighth Circuit is whether the U.S. District Court should be told to let the case proceed. There is still no hearing date in the Eighth Circuit, but it could possibly be in June.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Republican Party of Louisiana v Federal Election Commission, 16-865, on May 18. The issue is the federal campaign finance law that restricts donations to state and local political parties, if the money will be used to help candidates for Congress and President. The 3-judge U.S. District Court had upheld the limits, in a decision issued November 7, 2016.
Last year, Colorado voters passed an initiative that changes Colorado primaries from closed primaries to semi-closed primaries. The initiative said independents could vote in any party’s primary. However, the initiative did not clarify whether independent voters had to make a public choice of which primary ballot they were choosing.
On May 8, SB 305 passed the Senate and a House Committee, and it will probably pass the House on May 10. It says that independents must make a public choice of which party’s primary they are choosing. The major parties, the only ones that normally have primaries in Colorado, desire to know who is voting in their primaries. The bill says that the independent voter will then be considered to be a member of the party whose primary ballot they chose, but then they are assumed to be independents again (automatically) when the next primary comes along. See this story.
