Third Way, a think tank in Washington, D.C., recently released voter registration data for all the states in which voters are asked on voter registration forms to choose a political party (or independent status). However, Third Way’s report only includes voters who are registered Republican, Democratic, and independent. There is no mention in the Report that approximately 2.4% of the nation’s voters (in the states that ask for party membership) are members of minor parties.

Some of the “independent” totals for certain states in the Third Way report do include minor party members, but the report does not tell its readers that this is the case. For certain other states, minor party members are completely outside any of the three columns, so that anyone using Third Way’s report to know the number of registered voters in that state will get an incomplete total.

The officers of Third Way have been asked to improve the Report. The initial response has been negative; an officer of Third Way said in an e-mail that their readers are not interested in knowing how many minor party registrants there are. Third Way has a large Board of Trustees, and a communication has been sent to each member of the Board. A majority of the Board members are associated with the banking and hedge fund industry. Here is a link to the Report. Ballot Access News encourages anyone to contact members of the Board of Trustees, or any one of them. Here is a list of the Board of Trustees.

On October 10, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Piersol issued his written opinion in South Dakota Libertarian Party v Gant, 14-cv-4132. This is the case over whether the state should have put the Libertarian Party’s nominee for Public Service Commissioner on the November ballot. The judge had denied relief on August 28, but only now has issued a written opinion. Here is the 12-page opinion.

One of the most important parts of the decision has been relegated to a footnote. See footnote 4, which says that the party’s own bylaws prohibit it from nominating a non-member. Generally, for a political party freedom of association lawsuit to succeed, there must be a conflict between a party’s bylaws and a state law. That is not the case in this lawsuit.

The Brookings Institution, a venerable think tank in Washington, D.C., has posted this article about top-two primaries.

The report, by Professor Elaine Kamarck and Georgetown Graduate Student Alexander R. Podkul, uses confusing vocabulary, and sometimes refers to top-two primaries as “blanket primaries.” Blanket primaries only exist in Alaska, and they provide that the top vote-getter in the primary from the ranks of each party advance to the general election. These definitions are all set forth in “Voting at the Political Fault Line” (lead author Bruce Cain), a compendium of scholarly articles about primaries published by the University of California Berkeley Press.