On May 31, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Hinkle granted injunctive relief to some organizations that wish to register voters in Florida. Here is the 27-page order. The case is League of Women Voters of Florida v Browning, 4:11cv628.

The laws that were enjoined were passed by the legislature in 2011. The first law that is enjoined is one that says groups that register voters must return all such completed forms to the elections office within 48 hours of the voter’s having signed the form.

The second law is one that requires groups to identify every person who works on a voter registration drive, even if the individual only hands out leaflets.

The third law enjoined is one that requires everyone who works on a voter registration drive to sign a sworn statement that he or she knows that anyone who submits a voter registration form that includes any false information is guilty of a felony. That law makes little sense, because people who help others fill out voter registration forms must submit all completed forms to elections officials, whether there is any misinformation on the form or not. Furthermore, a volunteer in a voter registration drive probably wouldn’t know if anything a voter wrote on a card is false or not.

A fourth law enjoined is one that requires voter registration groups to account for every blank form.

Texas held its primary for president and all other partisan office on May 29. Although final election returns are not available, the preliminary returns show only 1,443,782 votes in the Republican primary for President, and only 587,146 in the Democratic primary for President, for a total of 2,030,927 votes cast in both primaries together.

Texas has 13,065,425 registered voters.

By comparison, in 2008, there were 4,237,308 votes cast in both major party primaries for President.

On May 30, the Oregon Green Party filed a lawsuit in state court, arguing that the Secretary of State is misreading the definition of “political party” and that the party is ballot-qualified based on its vote in 2008.

The Secretary of State believes the vote test, when met, only gives a party one more election in which it is ballot-qualified. The party argues that when it met the vote test, that should count for the next two elections.

The party also argues that, separate from that, it should be considered ballot-qualified in three U.S. House districts where it met the vote test for Congress in 2010. Here is the complaint. The case is Woolley v Brown, in Marion County Circuit court. The Green Party will be recognized, no matter how this lawsuit turns out, if it gets its registration up to one-half of 1% by August 2012, and it is working on that goal. It needs about another 1,500 registered members.