On September 28, a lower Iowa state court ruled that a particular voter, convicted in the past of a drug offense, may not register to vote. The Iowa Constitution says ex-felons who had committed an “infamous crime” lose the right to register to vote. The ACLU, which represents the voter, will ask for State Supreme Court review. See this story.
Canada holds a parliamentary election on October 19. According to this story, the deadline for candidates file was September 28, which is only three weeks before the election itself.
Candidates get on the ballot by submitting 100 signatures and paying a filing fee of $1,000 Canadian dollars.
Reince Priebus, national chair of the Republican Party, says in an interview published in National Journal that he and many leaders of the Republican Party tend to believe that Iowa and New Hampshire should not always be the first states to vote for presidential nominees. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
On the evening of September 28, the Libertarian and Green Parties, and their 2012 national tickets, filed a federal lawsuit against the Commission on Presidential Debates. The case is Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, 1:15cv-1580. It has not yet been assigned to a judge. It asks for a jury trial. It argues that the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Laws do not permit the Commission to hold presidential debates and to exclude all candidates except the Democratic and Republican nominees. The lawsuit asks for damages relating back to the 2012 debates.
The Washington Times has this story about the lawsuit.
UPDATE: the case was assigned to Judge Rosemary Collyer, a George W. Bush appointee. Collyer was appointed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2013; she serves on that court until 2020. Earlier this month she ruled that a lawsuit filed by Republican congressmembers against Obamacare may go ahead.
New York has the most restrictive election laws in the nation, on the variable of when a voter must join a party in order to vote in its upcoming primary. New York voters who wish to vote in either the Republican or Democratic presidential primary next year must join that party by October 9, 2015. No other state has a deadline nearly that restrictive. The New York presidential primaries are on April 19, 2016.
This Buffalo News op-ed, by Peter Ryan, criticizes the restriction. It also criticizes the New York State Board of Elections for not publicizing this deadline on its website.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this deadline in Rosario v Rockefeller, 410 US 752, in 1973. The vote was 5-4.
