On November 22, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued an opinion in Beaufort County v South Carolina Election Commission, 27069. The 3-judge majority interpreted the state law to mean that the counties must pay for some of the election administration costs for the Republican presidential primary. Two judges dissented. Here is the opinion.
The November 22 Knoxville News Sentinel has this story about the Americans Elect petition for party status in Tennessee.
On November 22, a U.S. District Court in Illinois ordered the filing period shifted to a later period, for candidates for U.S. House running in Illinois primaries. The statutory period for filing petitions for primary ballot access is November 28 through December 3. But the order shifts this period to December 23-27. See this story. The reason for the shift is that no one can know for sure what the boundaries of the districts will be.
The change has no effect on the deadline for independent candidates, and the deadline for nominees of unqualified parties. Their petitions, which must contain 5,000 signatures, are due on June 25, 2012.
An Illinois Circuit Court in Chicago will hear Schmidt v State Board of Elections on Wednesday, November 23. This is the case over whether the Green Party is automatically still a qualified party in the four U.S. House districts, and the four State house districts, in which it polled over 5% in November 2010.
Illinois law lets parties that are not ballot-qualified statewide be ballot-qualified in jurisdictions in which the party polled at least 5% of the vote in the last general election. However, some Illinois election officials say when a district changes boundaries, even to a miniscule extend, that qualified status disappears.
The Guam government is planning on holding a plebescite soon over whether Guam should be an independent country, a state, or “free association”, which presumably means the status quo. On November 22, a Guam resident who is a U.S. citizen filed a lawsuit against the restrictions that say the only voters who can register to vote in this election are those who received U.S. citizenship as a result of the passage of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, and their descendants. Here is the 10-page complaint. The case is Davis v Guam and Guam Election Commission, cv-11-00035.
Roughly speaking, the Guam residents who received citizenship as a result of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam were the Chamorro people, the island’s inhabitants before the island was discovered by Spanish explorers. The lawsuit argues that the limit on who can vote in the upcoming plebescite violates the 15th amendment. The Guam government points out that people of other ethnic groups also were covered by the 1950 Organic Act, and some Chamorro people were not covered by the 1950 Act. Justin Raimondo has this commentary about the lawsuit at antiwar.com.
