See this story about Iran’s new election law. The law transfers authority for overseeing vote counting to a Central Executive Election Board composed of eleven members. The intent is to make it more likely that the vote count will be accurate and honest.
See this this story about the legal status of Americans Elect in Maine. Soon, the Maine Secretary of State will be notifying all Americans Elect registrants that their party did not retain its spot on the ballot. These voters will be given a chance to re-register, but those who don’t respond will automatically be converted to independent voters. Americans Elect only had 58 registered members as of November 2012.
In Maine, a qualified party goes off the ballot if a general election is held and fewer than 10,000 registered members of the party vote. Because Americans Elect had so few registrants, it was literally impossible for it to retain its spot on the ballot. In effect, Maine requires a party to have approximately 13,000 to 15,000 registrants to remain on the ballot. If a party did have that many registrants, it is extremely likely that 10,000 of them would turn out to vote in a presidential or a gubernatorial election, so a party can remain ballot-qualified in Maine indefinitely even if it never runs any candidates.
Meanwhile, Eliot Cutler, who was on the board of Americans Elect, has hinted that he will again be an independent candidate for Governor of Maine. See this story about the 2014 gubernatorial election.
Current Utah law lets voters join a party on primary day. However, current Utah law says that effective July 1, 2013, that policy ends, and the only voters who can vote in a closed primary after July 1, 2013 will be voters who had joined that party at least a month before the primary.
But on January 28, the House Government Operations Committee passed HB 262, which keeps the current policy in place indefinitely. In other words, assuming the bill passes, the policy that lets voters register into a party on primary day will continue to exist.
Utah has four qualified parties (Constitution, Democratic, Libertarian, and Republican). Each party decides for itself which voters may vote in its primaries. Currently, only the Republican Party requires its primary voters to be members of the party, so the bill only affects Republican primaries. Thanks to Nancy Hanks for this news.
On January 30, a small claims court in Los Angeles County heard arguments in the case called Patel v Associated Students. Graduate student Ankur Patel is compelled to be a member of the student body association at Cal State Northridge. Patel is suing for a return of his dues because the student association sponsored a debate in May 2012 for four candidates running for Congress in the 30th district. There were seven candidates on the June 2012 ballot for that seat. The Association refused to invite all seven candidates, on the grounds that it only wanted to hear from the four candidates it believed had a realistic chance of placing first or second.
Patel is a member of the Green Party, and one of the excluded candidates was Mike Powelson, the only Green Party member running.
The judge seemed interested in the case, and extended the normal time for a hearing of this nature. Finally he said he wants more time to think about the case, and set a new hearing for March 26.
The Lucy Burns Institute recently published a book, “Local Ballot Initiatives”, and the book is now free on-line. Here is the link. The book reveals that although only slightly fewer than half the states have initiatives for state laws, 48 state states have at least one municipality or other kind of local government that has its own initiative for local laws. Thanks to Leslie Graves for the link.
