Bloomberg has this essay by Leonid Bershidsky, about why two political parties aren’t enough for the United States. Bershidsky suggests that for the United States, a transition to using Instant Runoff Voting is more likely than that the U.S. would switch to proportional representation.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) plans to send 500 election observers to the United States, to evaluate the November 8 election. These observers would include Canadians as well as Europeans. See the web page of OSCE about its plans for U.S. observations.
In 2012, OSCE only sent 44 observers. OSCE feels there are so many problems with U.S. elections, it needs more observers. Of course the U.S. is a member of OSCE and U.S. observers regularly observe elections in other nations that are part of OSCE. Thanks to Election Administration Reports for the link.
This West Virginia newspaper story describes how county election officials were first ordered to remove various independent candidates from the November ballot (due to a State Supreme Court decision) and then were ordered to keep them on the ballot (due to a federal court decision a few days later). Fortunately for some county election officials, the original printed ballots had listed the candidates, and nothing had been done to block out their names, so the original ballots could be used.
On September 21, Rocky De La Fuente sued Virginia over its requirement that candidates for presidential elector must provide their full Social Security number to the State Board of Elections, before the petition for presidential ballot access may begin to circulate. De La Fuente v Alcorn, e.d., 1:16cv-1201.
The state form says the number is needed to identify the candidate in the voter rolls. This seems obviously not true. The form also asks for the voter’s name and address. That should be sufficient to identify the individual.
De La Fuente’s complaint says he was not able to circulate his petition as early as he otherwise would have, because so many potential presidential elector candidates refused to become candidates for presidential elector once they saw they had to provide their full Social Security Number.
On September 23, the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in Arizona Green Party v Reagan, 14-15976, saying that the party’s challenge to the February petition deadline for new parties fails because the Green Party submitted no evidence that the deadline is harmful. The decision is only 18 pages long and lays great emphasis on the party’s lack of evidence.
Page 14 says, “We do not know how difficult it was for the Green Party to collect the required signatures, how much the signature-gathering effort cost, whether petition efforts diverted the Party’s resources from other endeavors, whether the ‘mind of the general public’ was diverted from the election at the time the Party sought to collect the signatures, how difficult it has been for new parties to comply with the deadline historically, or even if the Party attempted to comply with the deadline at all. Without evidence, the burdens identified in the Green Party’s complaint are purely speculative.
The case arose in the 2014 election, when the party was unable to obtain the needed 23,041 valid signatures by the February 28 deadline. It did finish the petition by May 2014, and sued at that time. The petition submitted in May 2014 did have enough valid signatures, and the state used the petition to put the party on the ballot for the 2016 election, so the effort wasn’t entirely wasted.
