Jeffrey Selinger, a Professor of Government in Maine, has this column in the Bangor Daily News, describing the dynamic of how voters decide whom to vote for in three-candidate races. The column does not mention the obvious solution, ranked-choice voting or approval voting.
On August 24, two U.S. House candidates of the Illinois Green Party filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, in the Southern District, against the notarization requirement for each petition sheet, and the 5% petition requirement in combination with the 90-day limit for collecting those signatures. A typical U.S. House district in Illinois requires the nominee of an unqualified party to submit 14,000 valid signatures. The case also says that the requirement is particularly harsh in districts without a major population center, or districts in which the largest population center is bisected between two districts.
The case is Tripp v Smart, 14-cv-890. It is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Reagan, a Clinton appointee.
According to this Washington Post story, proponents of Oregon’s Measure 90, the top-two primary system, have already raised over $1,000,000 to advertise for their measure. The money is fundamentally from wealthy business interests.
On August 13, at the end of oral argument, U.S. District Court Judge John Tharp said he will issue a ruling on injunctive relief in Summers v Smart on Thursday, August 21, at 9:30 a.m. This is the Illinois Green Party ballot access lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the challenge process to the Illinois Libertarian statewide petition is completely over, but election officials say they won’t issue a decision as to whether the Libertarian slate should be on the ballot until August 22. It is not known if the delay in the Libertarian decision is related to the timing of events in the Green Party case or not. Although the Libertarian Party showed in the binder check process that approximately 33,000 signatures are valid (25,000 are required), the challengers are now trying to invalidate all the work of certain Libertarian circulators.
Jeffrey Amason, who successfully collected the signatures of 5% of the voters in his State House district, but who still isn’t on the ballot, still hasn’t received a court date for his ballot access lawsuit. The case is Amason v Ford, Superior Court, Fulton County, 2014-cv-249517. Here is a copy of his amended complaint. The issue concerns notarization of most of his petition sheets. Amason incorporated his campaign, and his wife is an officer of the campaign corporation. Georgia law says a corporate officer may notarize documents for the corporation, yet so far election officials have kept him off the ballot because his wife notarized almost all of his petition sheets, but not the ones she circulated herself.
If Amason gets on the ballot, he will be the first minor party candidate on the Georgia ballot for legislature since 2004 (excluding special elections, for which no petition is required). UPDATE: see this story about the lawsuit in the Cherokee Ledger-News of August 13.
