On December 5, U.S. District Court Judge James Teilborg declared Arizona’s definition of “political committee” to be unconstitutional because it is vague and overbroad. Galassini v Town of Fountain Hills, 2:11cv-2097. The case began in 2011 when Dina Galassini was threatened with prosecution bcause she had e-mailed a group of friends and suggested they hold a rally to oppose a bond measure, and she had not registered as a “political committee.”

After she sued, the legislature amended the law to provide that a “political committee” must have spent or raised $250. The town and the state then argued that because Galassini had not spent or raised that much, her lawsuit is moot. However, she still won a preliminary decision on September 30, 2013, because the law still left her in danger. As the 2013 decision explained, if any one of the people who attended her rally raised or spent $250, the entire group would be in danger of having failed to report as a “political committee.” Filing as a “political committee” involves choosing a chair and a treasurer (who must be separate people), and filing numerous campaign finance reports, and printing “paid for by (followed by the name of the committee)” on all the communications of the group.

After the 2013 decision, Galassini resolved her differences with the town government, but the new decision of December 5, 2014, still finds the state law unconstitutional. The opinion is especially critical of the state’s definition of “political committee”, which is contained in a single sentence that is 183 words long. The decision says that the definition is far too vague and confusing to be constitutional. Thanks to Dan Tokaji for this news.

Libertarian Chad Perry has won his run-off against his Democratic opponent. The office, Justice of the Peace, ward 7, Calcasieu Parish, is a partisan race. Here is a link to the returns. Scroll down to Justice of the Peace.

The Democratic-Republican Party of New Jersey, which appears on the ballot as the “D-R Party” (because the state won’t print the actual name of the party), had more candidates for congress in 2014 than any other party in New Jersey, other than the two major parties. It had a U.S. Senate candidate and five U.S. House candidates. Here is the party’s web page.

For the November 2015 election, when all of New Jersey’s Assemblymembers are up, the party plans to have a candidate on the ballot in all 40 districts. Each district elects two, so that involves recruiting 80 candidates. New Jersey defines “political party” to be a group that polled at least 10% of all the votes cast for Assembly, a definition that is so stringent, it has never been used since it was created in 1920, except by the two major parties.

Obviously, if any new party is ever to attain status as a “party”, it needs to run candidates for all 80 seats, to maximize the party’s vote. During the last 60 years, the only group that tried to do that was the Conservative Party in 1997. It succeeded in getting 47 candidates on for the 80 seats.

The D-R Party’s lawsuit over whether or not the two major parties should have lost their party column on the November 2014 ballot is still alive, and is waiting a briefing schedule from the State Appeals Court. A New Jersey law says that even qualified parties can’t have a party column on the November ballot unless their primary turnout that year was 10% of the previous election’s general election turnout. If the law had been enforced, there would have been no party columns on the November 2014 ballot, and all Republican and Democratic nominees would have been given the same unsatisfactory ballot format that all other candidates must suffer.