On August 10, Damon J. Baldone filed a lawsuit in state court, to force local election officials to accept his voter registration card that shows he is a Republican and a Democrat. Baldone is an attorney and is representing himself. The case is Baldone v Terrebonne Parish Registrar of Voters, 32nd judicial district court 175157.

Baldone hopes to run for the legislature again this year. If he were permitted to register into both parties, then he would be on the ballot as “Democrat, Republican.” The election is October 2015. Here is his Petition for a Writ of Mandamus.

Whether an individual can be a member of two political parties is an interesting philosophical question which has been very little litigated or discussed. It is somewhat similar to the question of whether an individual can be a member of two different churches.

In 2014, the New Hampshire legislature made it a crime for anyone to photograph his or her marked ballot and then show the picture to anyone else. On August 11, a U.S. District Court Judge struck down the law on the grounds that there is no evidence that the law is needed to provent bribery of voters. Rideout v Gardiner, 14-cv-489. Here is the 42-page opinion.

The opinion says the state is still free to make it illegal for anyone to pay anyone else to vote a certain way. The lead plaintiff is a state Representative who had opposed the law when it passed. Representative Leon Rideout deliberately took a picture of his own September 2014 primary ballot while he was in the voting booth, and then later he showed the picture to others. He was then threatened with prosecution but he was not actually prosecuted. A few other plaintiffs had also taken pictures of their ballots and posted them to social media without realizing they were breaking the law.

The state tried to argue that a voted ballot is government speech, but the decision says that argument is obviously wrong. The opinion depends partly on the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court opinion Reed v Town of Gilbert, the Arizona case that struck down laws that treated different types of sign differently depending on their content.

Attempts to keep voters from showing anyone their voted ballots are virtually hopeless, because so many states now permit voting by mail. Obviously when someone is filling out a ballot at home and then mailing it back to the elections office, it is impossible to enforce a principle that no one can ever show anyone else their voted ballot. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.