A Libertarian voter in Chester County, South Carolina, received this absentee ballot, which only lists President Obama and Mitt Romney for President. The voter complained and was told there wasn’t room for any other candidates. Now the county says it only printed one such ballot and all the others include all the legally-qualified candidates. However, neither the county nor the State Board of Elections will talk about how such a faulty ballot came to be printed.
On July 17, U.S. District Court Judge Richard W. Story dismissed the lawsuit Green Party of Georgia v Kemp, before the state had even filed its Answer to the Complaint. The Green and Constitution Parties immediately filed for reconsideration, but three months later, that request for reconsideration is still pending. It is unusual for requests for reconsideration to be pending more than a month or so. The case challenges the Georgia procedures for minor party and independent presidential candidates to get on the ballot.
Judge Story had dismissed the case without seeming to even notice that the precedents he relied on do not pertain to presidential candidates. Both the U.S. Supreme Court (in Anderson v Celebrezze) and the 11th circuit (in Bergland v Harris) had previously ruled that ballot access for presidential candidates involves a different set of standards.
Thomas D. Elias, a syndicated columnist in over 50 California daily newspapers, here celebrates the exclusion of minor party candidates from the November ballot. He is not factually correct when he says that there are no minor party candidates on the ballot for any congressional or state office. There are three Peace & Freedom Party candidates for the legislature on the November ballot. All three ran in races in which only one major party member filed to be on the primary ballot. Naturally, when only one major party member runs in a top-two primary, that leaves an opening for a minor party candidate to come in second. All three Peace & Freedom Party nominees happened to have been write-in candidates in the primary.
Elias seems to have no concept that general election season is one of the biggest and most important “public forums” in any free country. Locking out unpopular viewpoints from the general election campaign season represents a massive shrinkage of the free circulation of ideas.
Elias also reveals an unconscious contempt for ordinary voters. When a voter votes for a minor party nominee, that voter understands that he or she is not supporting the major party nominee whom that voter might prefer to the other major party nominee. Because Elias disagrees with that voter’s behavior, he wants to use the power of election law to interfere with voter freedom. This is a highly authoritarian action.
Ariana Eakle, an Oklahoma activist, has initiated a change.org on-line petition asking that Oklahoma ballot access laws be improved, so that Oklahoma voters in future have more choices for president in the general election than just the Democratic and Republican nominees. Anyone is encouraged to sign, regardless of residence. See here. UPDATE: here is a facebook page for the petition.
Oklahoma voters have now endured three presidential elections in a row with no ability to vote for president unless they vote for either of the two major party nominees. No other state has a record that bad, since the period 1956 through 1964. And even in the period 1956-1964, the only other states that were equally bad, to the extent of even denying write-in space on the ballot, were Nevada, Ohio, and South Dakota. The laws of all three states are far better now than they were in 1956-1964, but the Oklahoma laws are much worse now than they were then.
On October 22, a San Francisco Superior Court will hold a hearing on whether six individuals, including me, must pay almost $250,000 to the attorneys who intervened in the lawsuit Field v Bowen. Field v Bowen is a lawsuit filed in state court in 2010 that charged that two particular details of California’s new top-two primary law are unconstitutional. In 2011 the lawsuit lost. On August 1, 2012, a Superior Court Judge ruled that the six plaintiffs must pay attorneys fees to the groups that intervened in the case to defend the law. On September 17 that judge recused himself from any further proceedings on the attorneys fee matter, so a new judge will re-consider the matter on Monday, October 22.
Anyone who is interested in this matter is urged to attend the hearing, which is at 400 McAllister, at the corner of McAllister and Polk, just north of San Francisco City Hall. The hearing is at 9:30 a.m., room 302. Attendees must past through a metal detector and sometimes that is time-consuming, so it is better to arrive somewhat before 9:30 a.m.
Here is an article by Steve Hill in the BeyondChron of October 17. BeyondChron is an on-line San Francisco newspaper that has existed since 2004.
