The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on HB 5912 on Wednesday, September 19. This is a bill to end public funding for the national conventions of political parties. A similar bill already passed the U.S. Senate earlier this year. Thanks to the Center for Competitive Politics for this news.
On September 17, Ralph Nader and the Center for Competitive Democracy filed this amicus brief, in Field v Bowen. The issue is whether the six plaintiffs who challenged certain parts of California’s top-two open primary law should be required to pay almost $250,000 in attorneys fees to supporters of the top-two system who had intervened in the case.
On September 17, the Ninth Circuit struck down Montana’s ban on party endorsements of judicial candidates. Montana elects its judges in non-partisan elections. The decision is Sanders County Republican Central Committee v Bullock, 12-35543. The decision is written by U.S. District Court Jed Rakoff of New York, who is visiting the 9th circuit and participating in its work; he is a Clinton appointee. The other judges are Mary Schroeder, a Carter appointee; and Ronald Gould, a Clinton appointee.
Judge Schroeder dissented. Here is her dissent.
On September 17, a lower state court in Arizona removed Darin Mitchell from the November ballot. He had won the Republican primary in August for State Representative, 13th district. See this story. Mitchell is appealing to the State Court of Appeals, but Maricopa County wants to start printing its ballots tonight. It is not clear that the Republican Party can replace him. UPDATE: on September 18, a state Appeals Court restored him to the ballot. See this story. The reversal came less than an hour before the ballot-printing process was to start. FURTHER UPDATE: the case has been appealed to the State Supreme Court, but the State Supreme Court left him on. See this story.
In Arizona, voters elect two representatives from each state house district. If Mitchell had remained off the ballot and the Republican Party had not replaced him, then write-in votes would have determined the winner. If Mitchell were off the ballot, there would only be one name on the ballot (Republican Steve Montenegro) but the voters are allowed to choose two representatives. No Democrat, no independent, and no minor party member had filed to run in this district. Anyone may file as a declared write-in candidate up until five days before the election.
On September 18, the Tenth Circuit upheld the Kansas voter registration form, which won’t let voters register into unqualified parties. The Constitution Party had brought the case in 2010. The Tenth Circuit had already ruled in 1984 that Colorado must let voters register into unqualified parties, if those unqualified parties are active enough to have at least qualified their nominees for the November ballot using the independent candidate petition procedure.
The Kansas voter registration form has a checkbox for all the qualified parties, and for “independent”, but no blank line for a voter to write in the name of an unqualified party. Kansas is one of only two states that makes it physically impossible for voters to register into an unqualified party; the other one is Wyoming.
The new decision says that the Constitution Party doesn’t meet the standards set out in the 1984 decision, because the Constitution Party has never qualified any nominees for the November ballot by petition. However, the Tenth Circuit is mistaken. In 2004, the Constitution Party qualified Michael Peroutka for the November ballot as an independent presidential candidate.
The decision does acknowledge that the Constitution Party was a ballot-qualified party in Kansas in the past, but says that doesn’t count because at the time, the decision says, the party had a different name. But the Tenth Circuit got that wrong also; the party was on the ballot in 2000 as the Constitution Party. The party had petitioned as a party in 1998 under the name Taxpayers Party, and got enough votes in 1998 so that it was automatically on the ballot in 2000. But Kansas had let the party change its name in 1999 from “Taxpayers” to “Constitution.” See footnote 8 in the decision. The Constitution Party went off the ballot in 2002 because it failed the vote test.
