On November 10, the city council of Highland, California, will vote on a resolution to use cumulative voting in city council elections. According to this story, the measure is likely to pass. Highland is near San Bernardino, and has a population of 53,000.
On November 9, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed AB 4613, which provided for automatic registration of adult citizens. The legislature had passed the bill on June 29. Governor Christie waited until the last possible day for him to decide what to do about the bill.
The New Yorker has this article about polls, especially election polls, in U.S. history. There is much ammunition in this article to attack the idea that candidates should be invited into debates on the basis of poll results. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
This analysis at Presidential Debate News discusses the October 29 decision of the Commission on Presidential Debates to exclude every candidate who is below 15% in polls. The analysis notes that the CPD’s announcement acknowledges that the Commission was not unanimous. The CPD instead says that a “majority” of the board voted for 15%. The CPD won’t say what the vote was.
The analysis also points out that former President Bill Clinton is an honorary co-chair of the CPD, an obvious conflict of interest if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.
The North Dakota Libertarian Party held a state convention on November 7 and endorsed many candidates for statewide office. Technically those candidates aren’t the party nominees yet, but because the party has endorsed them, their names will go on the June primary ballot automatically. The party wants to run a full slate for all the statewide offices. Two offices, including Governor, are still not filled and the party will hold a later endorsement convention for those two offices when candidates are recruited. See this story.
The party polled enough votes in 2014 for Secretary of State to be on the 2016 ballot automatically. However, in 2016 the party is required to poll 5% for President or Governor; none of the other offices count. The party will probably try to persuade the legislature to expand the list of offices that count toward party status.
The party also recruited a candidate for the state legislature. No minor party candidate for the state legislature has been able to get on the November ballot since 1976. This is because the law requires parties that wish to place nominees on the November ballot for legislature to persuade approximately 10% of all the primary voters to choose that party’s primary ballot. North Dakota has open primaries. It is unheard of for a minor party primary ballot to be chosen by such a high proportion of primary voters. Even the Minnesota Reform Party in 1998 only had 3% of the primary voters choosing a Reform Party primary ballot, even though Jesse Ventura was on that ballot.
North Dakota Representative Corey Mock introduced a bill in the legislature this year to repeal the primary participation barrier, but it lost on the floor by 37-55. It is believed Mock wants to re-introduce the bill in 2016. Other states that once had primary participation laws, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, have all eliminated those laws. The Minnesota primary participation law was struck down by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2004. The Oklahoma legislature repealed its primary participation law in 1943 after the Republican Party had failed it in 1942.
