The last two candidates to file for a Virginia presidential primary are Jim Gilmore, who submitted a little over 6,000, and Martin O’Malley, who turned in somewhat more than 7,000. See this story.
UPDATE: according to this story, the Gilmore petition arrived only twelve minutes before the deadline.
This Washington Post story says top Republican Party officials met on December 7 and made some plans for a contested national convention.
Texas has a unique law that says if a group intends to qualify as a political party, it must notify the Secretary of State by January 2 of the election year. The Reform Party of Texas recently filed this notice.
According to this story, twelve Republican presidential candidates have already filed petitions to be on the Virginia presidential primary, as well as two Democrats. The deadline is 5 p.m., Thursday, December 10. The requirement is 5,000 signatures.
In the past, no Virginia Republican presidential primary has had more than seven candidates. There were seven in 1988.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard two redistricting cases on Tuesday, December 8. The Texas case, Evenwel v Abbott, got the most press attention. But the Court also heard an Arizona case, Harris v Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 14-232. Here is the transcript.
The Arizona case was won by the Independent Redistricting Commission last year in a 3-judge U.S. District Court. The case involves legislative redistricting. Some voters charged that the Commission impermissibly and deliberately put too many voters in the Republican-leaning districts, and too few voters in the Demoratic-leading districts.
An oddity in the case is that the Secretary of State Michelle Reagan, a Republican, is a Defendant, and yet she is on the side of the voters who filed the case. The former Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, is also a Republican, but he did not support the voters who filed the case. That resulted in the state’s former Attorney General defending the Independent Redistricting Commission when the case was in the lower court; yet in the U.S. Supreme Court the current Attorney General argued against the Commission.
