Dan Winslow, a Republican candidate in the special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, has asked the Federal Election Commission whether he can accept a contribution of $5,200 from a Massachusetts married same-sex couple. If the couple were of opposite sex, this contribution would be legal. See this story. Thanks to the Center for Competitive Politics for the link.
On April 1, the California Assembly Elections Committee introduced AB 1419, which improves the deadline for a newly-qualifying party to qualify. Current law says a newly-qualifying party must finish the work of getting on the ballot by the first week in January of an election year. The bill would set forth a procedure by which a newly-qualifying party that only wanted to participate in the presidential election could qualify by early July. The bill exists because the old deadline, as least as applied to presidential elections, was held unconstitutional last year.
The Nation has this article by Russell Mokhiber. The article advocates that Nation readers think seriously about running for state legislative seats. To encourage this, the article tells the story of Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins, a 24-year-old Democrat who was elected to the Alaska legislature in 2012, in a district in which the incumbent had been perceived by observers as someone who could not be defeated. The larger point of Mokhiber’s piece is to emphasize how many legislative districts there are with those characteristics around the U.S., and to encourage activists to run to win. A few of the facts in the article originated with data first published in Ballot Access News.
According to this story in the New York Post, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, once a generous patron of both the statewide Independence Party, and the New York city Republican Party, doesn’t plan to give those parties any more contributions. Bloomberg is a registered independent.
On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain struck down one provision of New York city’s public funding program. Here is the 23-page opinion in Ognibene v Parkes, southern district, 08-cv-1335.
The unconstitutional provision provided that when a publicly funded candidate has an opponent who spends a great deal, then the amount of matching funding that the publicly funding candidate is potentially eligible to receive is four times greater than it would have been otherwise. The lawsuit had been filed in 2008 by a Republican Party candidate for city office. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
