According to this story, Chinese democracy advocate Sun Wenguang, age 82, was physically prevented from leaving his house. As a result, he was unable to meet the deadline for registering to be on the ballot as an independent candidate in an upcoming local election.
Jeff Strabone, a New York voter, has set up the webpage DirectElection.org. It has the postal addresses of 260 candidates for presidential elector. It also has information about the history of the electoral college, and the history of attempts to abolish it. The purpose of the web page is to assist individuals who wish to write postal messages to candidates for presidential elector.
On December 6, two Colorado presidential electors sued the Governor and Secretary of State of Colorado, to establish that they, and all presidential electors, have a constitutional right to vote for any qualified presidential candidate when they vote as electors on December 19. Baca v Hickenlooper, 1:16cv-2986.
The two electors, Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich, received an e-mail from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office on November 18. The e-mail says, “1-4-304(5) of Colorado Revised Statutes state that presidential electors shall (must) vote for the presidential/vice-presidential ticket that receives the most votes in the state. Thus, if an elector failed to follow this requirement, our office would likely remove the elector and seat a replacement elector until all nine electoral votes were cast for the winning candidates.” The e-mail is signed by Joel Albin, Ballot Access Manager, Elections Division.
Baca and Nemanich are Democrats. They have been telling the public and the news media that they believe the Republican nominees for president and vice-president would, if sworn into office, do great harm to the United States. Baca and Nemanich say they have been communicating with other presidential electors from both major parties, hoping to form a group of electors would who vote for a candidate other than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The basis for their lawsuit is that they face an imminent threat of being replaced as electors, and that such a replacement would violate Article Two, and the Twelfth and First Amendments.
Here is the eight-page complaint.
The case is assigned to Judge Wiley Daniel, a Clinton appointee.
On December 6, a New York state trial court held a hearing in Moody v New York State Board of Elections. At the conclusion of the oral argument, the judge ruled for the state. The issue is the very early deadline for a voter to switch parties. People who wanted to vote in the Democratic or Republican presidential primaries of April 2016 had to have been registered into that party by October 2015. No other state has a similar deadline. See this story.
A U.S. District Court in Philadelphia will hear Stein v Cortes, 2:16cv-6287, on Friday, December 9, at 1:30 pm in Courtroom 6B. This is the lawsuit over whether Jill Stein is entitled to a presidential recount in Pennsylvania. A state court ruled earlier that the voters who want the recount must pay $1,000,000, and that the Stein campaign can’t pay that for them.
