On October 12, the Alaska Supreme Court determined the identity of the winner of the Democratic primary for state house, 40th district. The primary had been in August. Only now can the state print the November 2016 ballots for the 40th district. See this story. By 4-1, the court said Dean Westlake, not Benjamin Nageak, had won.
Free and Equal is holding a presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado, on October 25. All presidential candidates who are on the ballot before at least 15% of the U.S. voters are invited. So far, Darrell Castle, Rocky De La Fuente, and Gloria La Riva have accepted. Candidates who are invited, but who have not said whether they will attend, are Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and Evan McMullin. See this Colorado news story.
Politico has this story about Robert Satiacum, Jr., a Democratic Party nominee for presidential elector in Washington state. Satiacum says he may not vote for Hillary Clinton in December, if he is elected to the electoral college.
Nevada is one of six states in which Jill Stein is not on the ballot this year. The Observer has this story about the Nevada Green Party’s petition drive this year. It suggests that the professional petitioning company the party hired submitted fraudulent signatures, which of course greatly injured the Green Party. The publisher of The Observer is Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump.
South Dakota is one of four states that has never permitted write-in voting. This year, there is so much interest in write-in voting, especially for President, that South Dakota Secretary of State Shantel Krebs felt compelled to say, in a speech on October 10, that South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins. See this story.
The reason South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins is that the 1891 legislative session, which passed a bill for government-printed ballots, wrote the law to bar write-ins. Back in the 1890’s and 1900’s decades, when state legislatures did that, state courts almost always ruled that ballots without write-in space are unconstitutional. Every state supreme court that considered the question, from the beginning of government-printed ballots in 1889, through 1989, always upheld write-in space, with the single exception of the South Dakota Supreme Court. State Supreme Courts in 20 states threw out write-in bans.
In 1901, a voter sued the Secretary of State of South Dakota over the write-in ban. Back then the South Dakota Supreme Court only had three members, and for that case, one of the three justices was unable to participate in the write-in case, Chamberlin v Wood, 88 NW 109. So only two members of the court heard the case, and they disagreed with each other. One justice voted to uphold the ban on write-ins, and the other voted to strike it down. On a tie, the statute survived.
The other states that never permitted write-in voting throughout history are Nevada, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. Louisiana permitted write-ins until the top-two system passed in 1975. Although Louisiana no longer uses top-two, it has never restored write-ins.
