Cracked.com, a ten-year-old comedy blog with a large readership, has this article about some deficiencies in U.S. election laws. The article includes ballot access laws, and specifically attacks Georgia. The article also illustrates bad examples of gerrymandering.

The information about Georgia is mostly accurate, but not entirely. Everything the article says about U.S. House ballot access is accurate. But the statewide petitions are about 50,000 signatures, not 250,000. Thanks to Andy Craig for the link.

Douglas E. Goodman, a Nevadan who is an advocate of election reform, favors eliminating the primary and simply holding a general election. The general election would use Instant Runoff Voting. Parties would be given the choice to either nominate someone for each office (at their own expense), or else abstain from nominating, thus allowing multiple members of that party to file for the November ballot.

Read Goodman’s proposal here. It is not clear if any legislator has agreed to sponsor this idea, but if the idea is introduced, it would apparently be in 2017.

On October 22, New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran resigned. See this story.

Secretary Duran has been hostile toward minor parties and independent candidates. In 2013 she removed the Green Party and the Constitution Party from the ballot, because each had run for President in 2012 and polled below one-half of 1%. But the law is ambiguous. Past Secretaries of State had interpreted the law to mean that a party stays on the ballot for two elections (after it submits a petition), not just one. A past Secretary of State had kept the Green Party on the ballot in 2005 even though it had polled less than one-half of 1% for President in 2004.