Over the June 2-3 weekend, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota held a state convention. Delegates voted by a margin of 60%-40% to put support for Ranked Choice Voting (sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting) into the party’s state platform.
The Socialist Workers Party will announce its national ticket on the weekend of June 23-24. The party has already filed for James Harris for president in Colorado, but he may just be a stand-in. UPDATE: the original post said the dates would be June 9-10, but that was incorrect and has been corrected.
The Socialist Workers Party is one of only two minor parties that has had a presidential nominee in every presidential election since the end of World War II. The Prohibition Party is the other such party. At one time or another, the Socialist Workers Party has placed its presidential nominee on the ballot at least once in all but twelve states. The most populous of the twelve states in which it has never had its nominee on the ballot is Georgia. During the 1970’s, the Socialist Workers Party filed more constitutional ballot access cases than any other party. Five times, its election law cases have received full opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court. The party won two of them (Ohio and Illinois) and lost the other three (Georgia, Washington, and Texas).
On June 4, U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) introduced a bill to delete any public funds for presidential convention expenses. The bill, if enacted, would not take effect until next year. Each party that polled at least 25% of the vote in the last presidential election is entitled to approximately $17,000,000 to help pay for its national presidential conventions. Parties that got 5% but under 25% get a lesser amount.
The bill would not have any effect on money spent by government to provide security for the conventions, which now requires an expenditure of approximately $100,000,000. Here is the text of the bill.
On May 17, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed HB 12-1292. It is an omnibus election law bill. It moves the deadline for an independent presidential candidate, or the presidential nominee of an unqualified party, from June 4 to August 8. This is a major improvement. Before this bill passed, Colorado had the nation’s earliest independent presidential deadline. The bill takes effect immediately.
Now, the earliest independent presidential petition deadline in the nation is on June 14. Two states use that deadline, North Carolina and Vermont. Lawsuits are pending against the deadlines of both states, although the North Carolina lawsuit concerns the deadline for newly-qualifying parties, not the independent presidential deadline.
The bill also raises the filing fee for independent presidential candidates from $500 to $1,000, effective 2016. Colorado had the nation’s most crowded presidential general election ballot in history in 2008. Sixteen candidates qualified. The presidential nominees of qualified parties do not need to pay a filing fee. Colorado’s qualified parties include the Republican, Democratic, Constitution, Green, Libertarian, and Americans Elect Parties.
On June 4, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Siegelman v United States, 11-955, even though over 100 former state Attorneys General had filed an amicus curiae brief, asking the Court to hear the case. See this story from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times that explains the case. Also, a group of distinguished election law professors had also filed a similar amicus curiae brief. Don Siegelman had appealed his bribery conviction. Many observers felt Siegelman was not guilty and that the Court needed to hear his case to set forth clearer standards about the precise connection between bribery and campaign contributions.
Siegelman is Alabama’s last Democratic Party governor. He was elected in 1998 and barely defeated in the general election of 2002. He had previously served as Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. Now that his U.S. Supreme Court appeal has been denied, he will go to prison.
The U.S. Supreme Court seems to have a pattern of refusing all election law cases, in years after which the Court had received a great deal of criticism for an election law decision. After the December 12, 2000 decision in Bush v Gore, the court then refused all new election cases for all of calendar year 2001, until December 3, 2001. Similarly, the Court has refused all new election law cases during 2011 and 2012 (so far), after having received a great deal of criticism for Citizens United v FEC and Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v Bennett, two campaign finance decisions decided by 5-4 votes.
