On June 5, the Arizona Senate unanimously passed HB 2518. The bill originally gave authority for cities and towns to use Approval Voting for their own elections. The Senate amended it to set up a joint legislative committee to study approval voting for local elections. Now the bill goes back to the House.
Approval voting lets voters vote for as many candidates as they wish, even when only one is to be elected.
On May 31, Paul S. Leon, Mayor of Ontario, California, changed his registration from “Republican” to “independent.” He has also filed for the special election to fill the vacant 52nd Assembly seat. That election will be on July 23. He will be facing eight other candidates, all of whom are Democrats or Republicans. See this story.
Leon ran in a special election earlier this year for State Senate, with the “Republican” label. He did not win.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Nader v Serody, 12-1294, on June 20. The issue is whether the people who challenged Ralph Nader’s 2004 Pennsylvania petition should be allowed to seize Nader’s funds from his Washington, D.C., bank account, to pay court costs. Although this has been litigated before, when it was litigated in Pennsylvania state courts, no one knew that the challengers had improperly and illegally used state resources to help with the challenge. This particular current case comes from the court of Washington, D.C.
Here is a link to the election returns for Missouri’s special U.S. House election. The Constitution Party nominee, Doug Enyart, is at 3.6%. While that is not an especially strong showing, it is easily the best showing for U.S. House that the Constitution Party has ever made in Missouri. Until this election, the party had never hit as much as 2% for any of its U.S. House candidates in Missouri.
On June 3, the Illinois Libertarian Party filed a brief in U.S. District Court in Chicago, asking that the Illinois “full-slate” law be held unconstitutional. This is the law that requires newly-qualifying parties (but no other parties) to run a full slate of candidates when they petition. Last year the Court enjoined the law and suggested it is unconstitutional, but now the party seeks a formal declaration that the law is unconstitutional.
The “full-slate” law is especially injurious to minor parties when they try to run for county partisan office. The law doesn’t have any effect for U.S. House elections, or legislative elections, because those are elections in which the voters of any particular part of the state are only electing one office-holder anyway. But when parties try to run a single nominee for a county legislative body, usually that county is electing several office-holders from a single district, sometimes as many as six. Also, of course, the law creates a problem when a party wants to run for one, or several, county executive offices, but not all of them. The candidate-plaintiff in this lawsuit, Julie Fox, wanted to run for Auditor of Kane County in 2012, but she was not permitted to petition for a place on the ballot as a Libertarian unless the party nominated a full slate of all the executive positions.
