Congratulations to Jill Stein. The Democratic Party and the Harris/Walz ticket are now running an attack ad on her in “battleground states.” This, of course, is a problem of the legacy parties’ own doing, as they could provide Ranked Choice Voting or other alternative voting methods to the American public.
Here is a USA Today story on Stein and other minor party presidential candidates.
This isn’t the most unbiased story that you’ll ever read, but it is an interesting one on an effort by to place initiatives on the ballot in certain Arkansas counties that would mandate use of paper ballots in those counties. The main reason for the failure of these initiatives to make the ballot is that Arkansas bans out of state residents from circulating initiative petitions in Arkansas.
I hope there is upcoming litigation to challenge that law, and there should be. For candidate and party petitions in the United States, there are no longer any restrictions barring out of state residents from circulating petitions. There used to be many such restrictions, including in Virginia, where, in the 1980s, petition circulators had to be Virginia registered voters and could only gather signatures of voters in their own congressional district on statewide candidate petitions.
It appears that not identifying specific voters who were harmed by not extending the deadline was the reason for these court losses for the Plaintiffs.
On electionlawblog.org, UCLA law professor Rick Hasen writes “I’ve never seen anything as crazy as this introduced in a legislative body.
Here’s a story from The Christian Science Monitor on former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, working for a redistricting reform constitutional amendment that is on the Ohio ballot this fall that is opposed by the Republican Party of Ohio.
