According to this newspaper story, later this month, a jury trial will start in Houston, Texas, over whether the city government acted improperly when it kept a city initiative off the November 2014 ballot. Jury trials in election law lawsuits are virtually unheard of, but this case seems to be a rare exception.
The Secretary of State of Arizona publishes voter registration tally every three months. The January 1, 2015 tally will be ready sometime within the next two weeks, and will include the Green Party. The Secretary of State had determined on December 19, 2014, that the party’s petition to regain its place on the ballot was valid, but at that time it wasn’t clear that the Greens would be included in the next voter registration tally.
Persons who were registered “Green” in the past, and who didn’t re-register into another party or as independents since then, will be included. Although Arizona voter registration tallies never show data for unqualified parties, and lumps them into the “independent” column, the state acknowledges that those voters retain their old party membership. This is in contrast to Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wyoming, which convert all members of disqualified parties into independents, whether the voter desires that or not.
William Cantley, a city councilman in Riverside, Alabama, has left the Republican Party and joined the Constitution Party. Riverside has a population of 2,000 and is in St. Clair County, in the northeast part of the state. Alabama does not have registration by party, so party membership is largely a matter of declarations by individuals. Riverside has non-partisan city elections. Thanks to Frank Fluckiger for this news.
This New York Times article explains that a constitutional crisis is looming in Washington state. The State Supreme Court has ordered the legislature to substantially increase education funding, but the legislature seems disinclined to follow the court order. As background, the Washington state legislature is the fourth most polarized between the Democratic and Republican Parties in the nation, according to recent data from political scientist Boris Shor.
Washington has used the top-two system starting in 2008. California supporters of the top-two system, especially journalists George Skelton and Thomas Elias, never tire of telling their readers that top-two systems reduce polarization and partisanship, but neither Skelton nor Elias has written about Washington state’s experience with that system.
On January 13, Virginia held a special election to fill the vacant State House seat, district 74. The independent candidate won the election with 42.3% of the vote. Here is a link to the State Board of Elections’ web page, showing the election returns. The winner, Joseph D. Morrissey, had been elected in 2013 as a Democrat, but he had resigned late last year. The Democratic Party was not interested in renominating him, so he ran as an independent. The Democratic nominee placed second; the Republican nominee placed third.
UPDATE: this story explains why Morrissey resigned and also says some legislators will try to expel him from the legislature.
