On June 20, the Oregon House passed SB 146, which provides that if a party meets the vote test, it is on the ballot for the next two elections, instead of just the next election. The bill is now through the legislature.
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On June 20, the New Jersey Supreme Court declined to hear the case that challenges the October 16 date for the special U.S. Senate election. See this story. This makes it certain that the election will be held in October. There is a bill pending in the legislature to move the November 5 election for state office to October 16, however, so it is still conceivable that New Jersey will just have one important general election date this year instead of two.
As noted here earlier, on June 17, a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., denied the Federal Election Commission’s request for reconsideration in Libertarian National Committee v FEC. The issue is whether the party is entitled to have its case heard before all the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. The Courthouse News Service has this article about the ruling. It is somewhat unusual for Courthouse News Service to cover a denial of a request for rehearing. Generally the Courthouse News Service only writes about important court decisions, not on whether a request for rehearing is denied. But the News Service felt this development was interesting enough to cover, probably because the judge’s decision, denying rehearing to the FEC, is so interesting. The judge several times quoted from the transcript of the original hearing to show that points the FEC had conceded at oral argument, it now seems to want to retract.
As previously noted, on June 17, the Hawaii Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the party is entitled to restrict voting in its primary elections to party members. Hawaii has never had registration by party.
In order to prevail, the party must overturn a section of the Hawaii Constitution. Article II, section 4, says in part, “No person shall be required to declare a party preference or non-partisanship as a condition of voting in any primary or special primary election.” The party argues in its Complaint that the state Constitution and state election code prevents the party “from exerting any control over who may participate in the nomination of its candidates…A potential effect is that the active, earnest, and faithful members of the party may be substantially outnumbered in their own nomination process, by persons unknown to the party.”
The case is Democratic Party of Hawaii v Nago, 1:13cv-301. Here is the Complaint. It was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge J. Michael Seabright, a George W. Bush appointee who, in past election law cases, has ruled for the state. In Nader v Cronin he upheld Hawaii law that requires six times as many signatures for an independent presidential candidate as are required for an entire newly-qualifying party. In Kostick v Nago, he was part of a 3-judge panel that upheld Hawaii redistricting, which excludes in the population counts certain voters (students or military) who seem not to be permanent residents. Judge Seabright is currently handling a case filed by the Justice Party against the February petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties to get on the ballot. Now that California’s deadline has been struck down, Hawaii has the earliest mandatory deadline in the nation for newly-qualifying parties to get on the ballot.
On June 19, the New York Libertarian Party won its lawsuit over the 2010 ballot. Here is the 45-page decision, Credico v New York State Board of Elections, 10cv-4555, eastern district. New York election law lets two parties jointly nominate the same candidate. If a candidate receives the nomination of two qualified parties, his or her name is listed twice on the ballot, once in each party’s column.
But if two unqualified parties jointly nominate the same candidate, the candidate can’t be listed twice, and must tell election officials which party’s line he or she wants to appear on. In such cases, even though the candidate is listed only once on the ballot, and voters can only vote for him under one label, both party labels are printed in that single space.
This is a rare case in which a minor party won on the basis that the law is discriminatory. Generally when minor parties and independent candidates win ballot access constitutional lawsuits, the basis is the First Amendment. The decision acknowledges that the burden on minor parties, under the challenged law, is not severe. No voter is prevented from voting for any particular candidate. Nevertheless, even though the burden is not severe, the law is unconstitutional because there are no valid state interests. The state claimed two state interests: (1) preventing a candidate from appearing twice on the ballot was an attempt to prevent using the ballot for “campaign advertising”; (2) the law avoids voter confusion. The court said reason (1) can’t be valid, because the state already lets candidates nominated by multiple qualified parties do the same thing. The court said reason (2) is not valid because the law actually causes more confusion than it prevents. The law required Randy Credico, nominee for U.S. Senate of both the Libertarian Party and the Anti-Prohibition Party, to choose one of those lines, even though both parties had nominated him. Therefore, one of the two parties would be forced to have a blank space on the ballot in its column, yet its name would appear in tiny print for that one office in another party’s column, something that is very confusing.
The decision is long because the state raised so many procedural objections to the lawsuit, insisting that the lawsuit was moot because the Anti-Prohibition Party no longer exists, and insisting that some of the plaintiffs weren’t properly in the lawsuit. The decision dismissed these procedural objections.