The Egyptian presidential run-off was held June 16-17, but the results still aren’t out, and they won’t be for several days. See this news story.
This contrasts with the vote tallies in the May initial presidential election, when the results were released quite soon after the polls closed.
The Knoxville News Sentinel has reported that the Green Party is running two candidates for the state house in the Knoxville area, and that they will be the only opponents in the general election to the incumbents. See this story, from a television station’s web page, which refers to the newspaper story.
The Secretary of State’s web page refuses to list any Green Party or Constitution Party nominees for the November election, so far. The state is hoping to persuade the 6th circuit to remove those two parties and their nominees from the ballot. The 6th circuit has said it will not act on the state’s request until at or after the hearing on July 25. In the meantime, the parties and their candidates are on the ballot, and it seems petty for the Secretary of State to refuse to list the candidates.
As noted earlier, on May 17, the Constitution Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia against the unique Pennsylvania system that requires petitioning candidates and groups to be subject to as much as $100,000 in court costs, if their petitions are held to lack enough valid signatures. That case is Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele, 5:12-cv-2726.
The state has just asked for, and obtained, a 30-day extension to answer the complaint. The state’s answer is now due July 25.
On June 19, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the State Constitution’s one-year residency requirement for legislative candidates should be construed permissively. The case is Gray v Taylor, SC 92620. One incumbent Democratic legislator sought to keep her Democratic opponent off the Democratic primary ballot, on the grounds that he doesn’t live in the new district in which they are competing.
The State Constitution says the one-year residency requirement, in years after redistricting, is satisfied if the candidate lives in the same county “or” the old district. The candidate who was challenged lives in the same county, but he doesn’t live in the territory that comprises the old district or the new district. The State Supreme Court said he may run. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
On June 19, the California Senate Elections Committee passed AB 1436, the bill to permit individuals to register to vote on election day. See this story. Assuming it is signed into law, it won’t be in effect until 2015 at the earliest. By then there will be a means for polling place officials to check the state voter registration database to guarantee that the new voter isn’t already registered somewhere else.
The Senate committee also passed AB 2058, to make it illegal for registration workers to be paid “directly or indirectly” on a per-registration card basis. The vote was 3-2. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Richard Pan, said he will consider amending it later to ease the definition of “political party”. Representatives of the Peace & Freedom Party, and the Libertarian Party, testified that it is not fair to make it more difficult for parties to gain more registrations, and at virtually the same time eliminate them from the ballot unless they have approximately 105,000 registered members (Proposition 14, the top-two open primary, caused that problem).
The Senate Elections Committee also passed AB 2410, which says that persons convicted of certain types of felony may not run for public office. However, the bill was amended to apply only to state and local office; the bill no longer relates to federal office.
Also on June 19, the Assembly Elections Committee passed SB 1272, which says county central committee member elections are for four-year terms, not two-year terms. Candidates for this office will only run in presidential election years, at the primary. The Peace & Freedom Party and the Green Party persuaded the author of the bill to amend the bill, to provide that each state political party will decide for itself who is eligible to run for this office. The bill also expands the petitioning period for candidates to get on the primary ballot for this office.
The Assembly Elections Committee did not hear ACA 10, the measure to make it more difficult for initiatives (to change the California Constitution) to get on the ballot. That bill will probably be heard July 3.
