On May 23, the California Senate passed SB 1288 by 23-12. All Democrats who voted, voted “yes.” All Republicans who voted, voted “no” except that one Republican voted for the bill. The bill lets all cities and counties use Instant Runoff Voting for their own officers. Under current law, only charter cities and charter counties have that freedom. Most cities in California are not charter cities.
On May 23, the Ohio Libertarian Party asked the Sixth Circuit to put it back on the ballot. Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, 16-3537. The party was removed from the ballot in November 2014 because it did not poll 2% for Governor. It couldn’t poll 2% for Governor because its gubernatorial candidate was not on the ballot. He was not on the ballot because the Republican Party of Ohio, and the John Kasich re-election campaign, had challenged his primary ballot status.
The 39-page brief argues that the Republican Party of Ohio was a state actor when it became involved in the challenge. The brief depends on U.S. Supreme Court precedents that say political parties are state actors when they influence who appears on a ballot, either primary or general.
On May 22, Austria held its run-off presidential election. Alexander Van der Bellen, a member of the Green Party, and the leader of the party in the recent past, won with 50.3% of the vote. His ballot label was “independent”. See this wikipedia article about him.
This is probably the first time a member of the Green Party has won a nationwide vote for any office, anywhere in the world. Here is the wikipedia article about the election. The first round was held on April 24. A runoff was needed because no one got a majority in April. This is the first Austrian election since World War II in which neither major party won the presidency.
On May 22, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Virginia U.S. House districts that were drawn earlier this year by a 3-judge U.S. District Court. Wittman v Personhuballah, 14-1504. The U.S. District Court had redrawn the districts because it found the legislature’s plan, enacted after the 2010 census, to be a racial gerrymander.
The U.S. Supreme Court opinion is only eight pages and is by Justice Stephen Breyer. It does not decide the issue of whether the legislature’s plan was a racial gerrymander. Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court only decided that no one challenging the 3-judge U.S. District Court decision any longer has standing.
The Virginia State Board of Elections was controlled by Republican appointees when the original case was filed, in 2013. In Virginia, the State Board of Elections has three members, and two members must be members of the Governor’s party. Democrats won the governorship in November 2013, so under the new Governor, Terry McAuliffe, an all-new Board of Elections switched to a Democratic majority. The new board did not wish to appeal the decision of the U.S. District Court to the U.S. Supreme Court, so some Republican members of Congress from Virginia intervened in the case, and said they have standing because the new districts injure them, because the new district boundaries removed a portion of their “base”, and replaced them with “unfavorable Democratic votes.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that these members of Congress don’t have standing because they failed to submit any evidence that these allegations are true.
Thus, the case turned on the technicality that attorneys for the Republican members of Congress failed to prove that a Republican member of Congress is harmed by a redistricting plan that tilts the partisan balance of his or her district toward the other major party. Certainly, if the attorneys for the Republican members of Congress had realized that the U.S. Supreme Court would take advantage of this technicality, they easily could have proved this, but they probably assumed it was obvious and that no proof was needed.
North Carolina Representative Ken Goodman (D-Rockingham) has told the press in 2017 he will introduce a bill to help independent candidates. He is rightly critical of the extremely repressive ballot access requirements in North Carolina for independent candidates. They are so severe, no independent has ever appeared on a government-printed North Carolina ballot for Governor, U.S. Senator, or U.S. House. And the only time the independent presidential petition was used successfully was in 1992, when Ross Perot complied.
Unfortunately, Representative Goodman wants to introduce a bill in 2017 saying all independent candidates would run in a primary that was for independent voters, and the person who won that primary would be on the November ballot with no petition. There are two problems with this idea: (1) the filing deadline for a North Carolina primary is in early December of the year before the election; (2) independent voters, almost by definition, are not associated with each other, and there is no logical underpinning to treating them as a party. In 1980, the North Carolina petition deadline for independent candidates was declared unconstitutionally early, and that deadline was in April. If April of the election year was too early, surely December of the year before the election could not stand.
The purpose of the independent candidate ballot access procedures is to give general election voters another option, if voters are unhappy with all the party nominees for any particular office.
Although Representative Goodman says he wants to help independent voters, he is not among the 28 North Carolina Representatives who co-sponsored HB 509 in the current session.
