Professor Lawrence Lessig has met his goal of receiving at least $1,000,000 in contributions and pledges, and will now seek the Democratic presidential nomination. See his web page here. He is campaigning on election law issues, mostly campaign finance, but he also talks about alternative voting systems. His first goal is to establish public funding for congressional candidates.
See this news story.
Alexandria, Virginia elects a Mayor in a partisan election on November 3, 2015. Incumbent Mayor Bill Euille will run for re-election as a write-in candidate, according to this news story. He will make it official on September 7. He must be a write-in candidate because he lost the Democratic primary on June 9, and it is too late to file as an independent candidate.
The Wichita Eagle has this article about the ACLU lawsuit over the status of Kansas residents who filled out federal voter registration forms. The Kansas Secretary of State had earlier said such individuals may only vote for federal office, not state and local office. An ACLU lawsuit on behalf of two voters is pending in state court. Presumably the case is called Aaron Belenky v Kris Kobach.
The Kansas Secretary of State granted full voting rights to the two plaintiffs after he looked up their records in the drivers license records and determined they are citizens. He then attempted to get their case dismissed on the grounds that they no longer have any cause to complain. But the state court ruled last week that they still have standing because (1) they were denied the right to vote in earlier elections; (2) the problem is capable of repetition because there are tens of thousands of similarly-situated applicants who still can’t vote in state and local elections.
The Deseret News, one of the daily newspapers in Salt Lake City, has this story about the hopes of some Republican Party activists who hope Mitt Romney will be the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. The story mentions that many states have November 2015 deadlines for candidates to enter Republican presidential primaries. No state has an earlier deadline that November 2015 except for South Carolina, where Republicans file by September 30, 2015.
The Citizens Voice, one of the two daily newspapers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, has this story mentioning the upcoming legislative hearing on ballot access. The hearing is Tuesday, September 22, at 9 a.m. It concerns SB 495.
