On December 16, President Obama signed the spending bill that includes a provision to make possible larger donations from individuals to national committees of political parties.
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On December 16, an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit heard arguments in Chula Vista Citizens for Jobs v Norris, 12-55726. The issue is whether proponents of a local initiative have a privacy right to keep their names off the initiative petition. The proponents formed an organization and the organization is willing to be listed on the petition as the proponent, but state law requires that individuals must be listed as the proponents. See this account of the oral argument.
The original Ninth Circuit panel had struck down the law by a vote of 2-1, but then the government obtained a rehearing en banc.
On December 16, the United States Election Project revised its turnout data for the November 2014 election. See the data here. Not every state tabulates the number of people who cast a ballot, so the authors created the middle column, based on the number of votes cast for all the candidates for the office that attracted the most votes. The middle column is the best way to compare turnout in all 50 states.
Chicago holds city elections in February 2015. There are three citywide offices, Mayor, Treasurer, and City Clerk. The elections are non-partisan. All candidates need 12,500 signatures to get on the ballot. If no one gets 50% in February, there is a run-off in April.
For Mayor, ten candidates submitted a petition, but one candidate then withdrew, leaving nine petitions. For Treasurer, only one person filed. For City Clerk, two candidates filed. From those remaining twelve petitions, nine have been challenged, including both petitions for City Clerk. Here is a link to the Chicago Board of Elections web page listing the petitions and their status.
The challenges will be heard starting on Friday, December 19. Here is an article about Willie Wilson, one of the Mayoral candidates whose petition was challenged, even though he submitted 47,500 signatures. Here is a more recent article about Wilson and his reaction to the challenge of his petition.
On December 16, the Eleventh Circuit issued a five-page “per curiam” decision in Stein v Chapman, 13-15556, the lawsuit that challenges Alabama’s March petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties in presidential election years. The decision says that because the plaintiffs Libertarian, Green, and Constitution Parties presented “no” evidence, there is no reason to disturb the filing deadline.
Actually, the plaintiffs presented a great deal of evidence, but it was almost entirely excluded at the U.S. District Court stage because of a legal technicality involving filing a notice of the plaintiffs’ list of witnesses. But even without that problem, there is evidence in the case inside the many depositions that the state of Alabama conducted.
Furthermore, there is a strong case to be made that petition deadlines as early as March are unconstitutional on their face, and therefore evidence is not needed. The decision says, “Neither the Supreme Court nor this court has articulated a clear standard of review for challenges to ballot-access restrictions in a presidential election”, but that is not true, because the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a balancing test in Anderson v Celebrezze in 1983, when it struck down Ohio’s March petition deadline for independent presidential candidates. The Eleventh Circuit opinion quotes the U.S. Supreme Court sentence in Anderson v Celebrezze that “the State has a less important interest in regulating Presidential elections than statewide or local elections”, but having quoted that sentence, the panel ends the discussion, except to return to the point that plaintiffs didn’t present evidence.
If you use the link to read the Eleventh Circuit opinion, you may notice that the front page says the decision is 29 pages, but actually the decision itself is only five pages; the other 24 pages is an attachment.