On June 11, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed HB 222. It generally lets members of the State Supreme Court retain their seats without having to face opponents. Instead they appear on the ballot and a voter votes on whether or not to retain that Justice. The new procedure does not apply to candidates who were recently appointed and never ran in any type of election; they are still subject to having an opponent and having to run against that opponent in non-partisan elections.
According to this story, some leaders of the Utah Republican Party still don’t accept the 2014 law that lets people run in Republican primaries (if they submit a petition), even though they didn’t show substantial support at a party meeting. The party will decide in August on whether to change the bylaws to say that someone who tries to run in a Republican primary without having shown support at a party meeting is, by definition, not a member of the party.
Pennsylvania state government attorneys did not appeal any of the three points won on March 2, 2015, by the Libertarian and Green Parties in Green Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele. The government deadline to appeal was June 11, but no government appeal was lodged.
The three points that had been won on March 2, 2015, were: (1) the ban on out-of-state circulators is unconstitutional; (2) the requirement that each petition sheet be notarized is unconstitutional; (3) the ban on a voter signing the petitions of different petitioning parties, even if they are running for the same office, is unconstitutional.
The two parties are appealing the points they lost: (1) whether voters from different counties can sign the same petition sheet; (2) whether persons who are not registered to vote but who are eligible to register to vote can sign petitions.
This press release from “Level the Playing Field” argues that at least seven of the seventeen Presidential Debates Commissioners have conflicts of interest, and gives details.
Matt Bai is a politics columnist for Yahoo! News and a former chief political writer for New York Times Magazine. His column about the upcoming presidential primary debates says, “Polls have no business in the debate process.”
All of the recent controversy around the Republican presidential debates will be useful in opening up the general election presidential debates. If a consensus seems to be building that it is wrong to exclude Republicans who are at least at 1% in polls, there is no logic that says 15% in the polls is a proper cutoff for general election debates.
