New York Upstate Ballots Squeeze Libertarian Party Into Same Row as “Stop Common Core” Party

Posted on by October 11, 2014
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Even though New York state no longer uses mechanical voting machines, election authorities in that state continue to design ballots as though mechanical voting machines still exist. Here is the New York November 2014 ballot for counties outside New York city. Instead of listing all the candidates for Governor in an uninterrupted column, the ballot squeezes two gubernatorial candidates into the same row. The “Stop Common Core” Party, which is just a Republican Party-supported extra column for Republican nominees, and the Libertarian, are squeezed into column I.

The six qualified parties are entitled to the top six lines, so the Green Party, which has been ballot-qualified for the last two elections, was not at risk of being put into such a bad spot on the ballot.

U.S. District Court Judge Issues Written Opinion in South Dakota Over Whether Parties May Nominate Non-Members

Posted on by October 11, 2014
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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.

Brookings Institution Report on Top-Two Primaries

Posted on by October 10, 2014
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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.