On May 8, the California Assembly Appropriations Committee unanimously passed AB 1419. This is the bill that gives newly-qualifying parties until July of an election year to get on the ballot, if they are only interested in the presidential race that year. The current deadline of January was held unconstitutional last year.
The Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE) will hold its annual board meeting on July 14, Sunday, in New York, at 339 Lafayette Street, third floor, at 1 p.m. COFOE was formed in 1985 and is a loose coalition of most of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, plus other groups that support fair treatment for minor parties and independent candidates.
COFOE recently made a contribution to the legal costs for the ongoing Alabama ballot access lawsuit. Previously COFOE helped fund the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in the lawsuit over whether election officials must tally votes for declared write-in presidential candidates. Unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear that case.
All of COFOE’s income comes from contributions from people like you. COFOE members receive a free subscription to the printed Ballot Access News.
On May 7, proponents of an initiative in Long Beach, California, filed a federal lawsuit against a restrictive California election law concerning validity of signatures on petitions. Section 105 of the California election code says a signature on any type of petition is invalid, if the address of the voter on the petition differs from the voter’s address in voter registration records.
This law, interpreted literally, means that a voter who signs a petition and who then moves and promptly re-registers at the new address, will have his or her signature invalidated. This happens because there is obviously a time lag between the day the voter signs the petition, and the day the petition was checked. While it may seem that this does not happen very often, it did happen often enough to affect one particular initiative this year.
A Long Beach city initiative to legalize medical marijuana was circulated this year. Proponents needed 33,543 valid signatures and submitted 43,159. The city did a random sample of the petition. The results are so close, the random sample will determine that the petition had enough valid signatures only if the California law is construed to validate the signature of eleven particular voters (whose signature were chosen for the random sample) who listed their correct address at the time on the petition, but who then moved and re-registered. If these signatures are not counted, then the petition failed the random sample process. The case is Coltharp v Herrera, central district, 2:13-cv-3263.
On May 8, the North Carolina House Elections Committee passed HB 951. The bill eliminates the state income form check-off that asks voters if they would like to direct $3 to the poltical party of the taxpayer’s choice. Now the bill goes to the Finance Committee. The bill is expected to pass.
Every presidential campaign, major and minor, that receives public funding from the Federal Election Commission must later undergo an audit by the FEC. Jill Stein’s campaign has this brief description of the process, which is underway now. FEC employees are apparently spending five weeks in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Stein campaign headquarters.
