The Albany Times-Union here calls on the New York legislature to ease ballot access procedures.
Reply
The New Jersey Republican Party has dropped its lawsuit to place one of its nominees, Fernando Alonso, on the November 3, 2015 ballot for Assembly, 38th district. Instead it will try to elect him on write-in votes. See this story.
The party withdrew its lawsuit because so many ballots had already been printed without Alonso’s name on the ballot. The winner of the Republican primary for that seat will remain on the ballot, even though he says he is not a candidate. He withdrew earlier this month.
It was reported earlier that Florida Republicans had not invited Republican presidential candidate Jim Gilmore to the November 13-14 fundraiser, which meant that if he wanted to appear on the March 2016 presidential primary ballot, he would need to either pay $25,000 or submit a difficult petition. But Gilmore has now been invited to the Sunshine Summit, and he will attend, so he is now excused from the fee and the petition.
The most prominent Republican candidate who has not been invited is Mark Everson.
According to this story, when Speaker John Boehner resigns, election officials in Butler County, Ohio, will be required to spend approximately $1,000,000 for a special primary and then a special general election to fill his seat. Boehner hasn’t actually resigned yet so the Governor hasn’t yet set the date of a special election. It seems conceivable Boehner may change his mind and not resign, although the article doesn’t discuss that. Butler County is one of six counties in the Eighth District, so presumably the total election administration of the special primary and special election will be perhaps $5,000,000.
The article quotes Butler County Commissioner Don Dixon as saying that Congress should just appoint a temporary member of Congress, but Article One of the U.S. Constitution does not permit anyone to serve in the House who had not been elected by the voters.
The October 13 Democratic presidential debate held in Las Vegas was two hours long, but not one minute was devoted to voting rights, or problems with voting practices. This is somewhat surprising, because Democrats have been vocal about some voting rights problems. In 1984 the Democratic National Convention passed a resolution that said, “Be it further resolved that the Democratic Party of the United States recognizes the right to vote as the most fundamental of all rights in our democracy. And no duty of the Party is more important than protecting the sanctity of this right.”
Of course, part of the blame for the absence of voting in the debate is that the moderators didn’t choose to ask about the issue. The United States is the only nation in the world that holds elections and yet denies a voting representative for citizens who live in the national capital. The United States is the only nation in the world that prevents persons from voting because they committed a crime in the past. The United States is the only nation considered free and democratic that has general election ballots that, by law, only contain two candidates. The United States is the only nation in the world that has an overseas territory of more than 500,000 people that has no voting representation in the national legislature. The United States is the only nation that holds a popular election for head of government and permits the person who polled the most votes to fail to take the office, whereas the person who polls the second-highest number of votes can sometimes take the office.
There are other voting rights problems as well. The Republican presidential debates of August and September 2015 didn’t mention voting rights problems either.