The U.S. District Court that is hearing Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted has ruled that Terry Casey must produce redacted portions of some text messages he sent in the spring of 2014, when he and others involved with the Ohio Republican Party and the John Kasich gubernatorial campaign were engineering a challenge to keep the Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate off the ballot.

Terry Casey is a Republican activist who was active in finding someone to challenge the Libertarian gubernatorial primary petition, and finding money to pay the challenger’s legal bills. In the end, the Republican Party of Ohio paid $692,000 in legal bills for the challenger, Gregory Felsoci.

The magistrate judge has ordered some redacted passages from text messages to be shown to the magistrate judge on September 25. One of the text messages is dated February 27, 2004, when another Republican texted Casey, “Would it help our case if one of the (Libertarian) circulators signed a Democratic petition this year?” The response from Casey was, “YES!! These are very important. Can we discuss more by phone tonight?” The response to that was redacted, but now the redacted part must be revealed, at least to the Magistrate Judge.

The Washington Post has this story about the lawsuit that the Libertarian and Green Parties will be filing in a few days. Even though the case isn’t filed yet, the attorneys gave the Post a copy of the complaint, and the Post article discusses that complaint.

It has now been 41 days since the Washington State Supreme Court issued an order fining the state $100,000 per day until the state legislature funds education in a manner that is consistent with the equal protections portions of the State Constitution. The legislature has not even been called back into session to deal with the problem. See this story, which says that no progress will be made until the partisan legislative caucuses are in agreement about a solution.

Washington state has been using top-two starting in 2008. Advocates of the top-two system have disseminated op-eds in several publications, all of which praise the top-two system for creating legislatures that are able to function effectively. But these opinion pieces never mention Washington state; instead they focus solely on California, where there is no legislative gridlock anymore because Democrats control both houses of the legislature with substantial majorities and the budget can be approved by majority vote.