The Economist has this article about polarisation in the United States. Near the end, it says, “There’s one Constitutional change that could unlock the crippling polarisation in American politics: a switch to a proportional-representation or single-transferable-vote system in one house of Congress. That would make multiple parties viable.”
UPDATE: also see this article by Krist Novoselic, published in Salon on May 17.
This New York Times article illustrates the old-fashioned mechanical voting machines that are likely to be used in the city’s elections this year. A bill to let the city use these machines, S4088, passed the State Senate on May 6, and will probably pass the Assembly this week. The bill only applies to the 2013 election. The machines have been in storage for two years. They are criticized because they don’t leave an audit trail. If they malfunction, there is no possibility of a recount.
On June 6, a conference committee in the Arizona legislature amended HB 2305 to make it vastly more difficult for members of small qualified parties to get themselves on a primary ballot. Current law sets the number of signatures needed for a candidate to get on his or her own party’s primary ballot as a percentage of the number of members of that party. But the bill changes that, so that the number of signatures needed is a percentage of all the registered voters from all parties.
Existing law requires signatures equal to one-half of 1% of party membership, to get on the primary ballot for statewide office. Thus Libertarians only need about 125 signatures of party members, and Greens only need about 27 signatures, and members of Americans Elect only need about 2 signatures. If the bill is signed into law, members of all parties, large and small alike, would need 5,376 signatures of party members to get on a primary ballot. For statewide office, the bill requires one-sixth of 1% of all the registered voters. It would continue to be true that only party members, and registered independents, could sign these primary petitions. This is the same type of system used in Massachusetts and Maine to keep small qualified party members from getting on their own party’s primary ballot.
If the bill is signed into law, there is reason to believe it would be held unconstitutional. In Storer v Brown, the U.S. Supreme Court said that petitions should be evaluated by arithmetic…if the number of required signatures, divided by the number of eligible signers, is greater than 5%, the law is almost certainly unconstitutional. HB 2305, as applied to the Green Party, would require a number of signatures approximately equal to the number of all the registered Greens in the state. The state would probably defend the law by saying that Greens have the ability to get primary signatures from the ranks of registered independents. But the party could argue that it has a constitutional right to exclude independents from voting in its primary, and if it did that, its members then couldn’t get primary signatures from registered independents.
The number of write-ins (for parties other than newly-qualifying parties) needed to be nominated in a primary is equal to the number of signatures needed to get on the primary ballot, so using write-ins at the primary would also be virtually impossible if the bill becomes law.
Scott Lay runs a well-read blog about California politics news called AroundtheCapitol. On June 6 he expressed the opinion that Ontario, California Mayor Paul Leon injured his chances in next month’s special legislative election, by changing his registration from Republican to Independent. Under California’s law governing ballot labels for independent candidates, he must now have the label “no party preference” on the ballot. A lawsuit is currently pending in the 9th circuit, Chamness v Bowen, that challenges the law that requires independent candidates to have that unattractive label on the ballot.
As noted earlier on this web page, a new party called the 1787 Party is in the process of being established. The blog Irregular Times has noted this development, and has turned its excellent investigative talents toward learning more about the party. Irregular Times was the best news source during the period 2010-2012 for news about Americans Elect. See here for the Irregular Times post about the 1787 Party.
