On September 3, Arnold Davis filed his opening brief in the Ninth Circuit in Davis v Guam, 13-15199. The issue is who should be allowed to register to vote, in an upcoming election over the future political relationship between Guam and the United States. Guam law says such a vote will be held as soon as at least 70% of the eligible voters have registered to vote. The Guam law also says that no one can register for this election unless they are descended from people who lived on Guam in 1899. The intent of that part of the law is to confine the election to the Chamorro people who were the traditional residents of Guam for centuries into the past.

Davis is a full-time resident of Guam who is permitted to vote in other Guam elections, but not the upcoming election on the status of the island because his ancestors didn’t live in Guam. The U.S. District Court ruled against him on the grounds that because the date of the election has not been set, and may never be set, his case is not ripe.

On September 9, the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously expanded the ability of independent candidates to run for judicial office, including not only judgeship elections, but elections for Clerk of a Court. The decision is State ex rel Coughlin v Summit County Board of Elections, 2013-3867.

Ohio and Michigan have peculiar elections for judicial office. Candidates are either nominated in partisan primaries or in party conventions, or they can petition directly onto the general election ballot if they do not wish to be entangled with political parties. But, oddly, no party names ever appear on the ballot for these elections. Ambiguity in the English language makes it unclear whether to refer to such elections as “partisan” or “non-partisan.”

Kevin J. Coughlin petitioned to be on the November 5, 2013 ballot as an independent candidate for Clerk of the Municipal Court in Stow, a city in Summit County. County election officials kept him off the ballot on the grounds that he was associated with the Republican Party. Ohio voter registration forms do not ask voters to choose a party. But Ohio is very fussy about keeping independent candidates off the ballot if they have associated with a qualified political party, so if challengers can show that an independent candidate has associated closely with a party, he or she is generally removed from the ballot. However, the Ohio Supreme Court said that judicial elections are not covered by this restriction.

Another issue in the lawsuit was whether the candidate had filed his lawsuit too late. He was told he was off the ballot on July 15, and the day after, he asked for a transcript of the Board of Elections hearing that excluded him. The Board didn’t furnish the transcript until August 1. The candidate sued on August 8. The Board said he filed the case too late, but the Supreme Court disagreed and said if the case was filed late, that was mostly the fault of the Board for taking so long to furnish the transcript.