Pennsylvania holds partisan primaries on May 17, 2011, including partisan judicial races. In Philadelphia, according to this story, Anita Smith is on the Democratic primary for Municipal Court Judge even though she is not an attorney. Pennsylvania law requires judges to be attorneys, but no one challenged her petition.
On May 6, the Texas House Defense and Veterans Affairs Committee passed SB 100, after amending it. The amended bill moves the Texas primary (for President and all other office) from March to April. It moves the runoff primary from April to June. This has the indirect effect of moving the petition deadline for new parties from May to June, and the indirect effect of moving the petition deadline for independent candidates (for office other than President) from May to July. The legislature’s web page hasn’t posted the text of the amendments, so it isn’t clear what happens to the petition deadline for independent presidential candidates. See this story.
On May 3, the Colorado House passed SB 189, and on May 5, the Senate concurred in the House amendments, so the bill is now through the legislature. The bill moves the non-presidential primary from the 2nd Tuesday in August, to the last Tuesday in June. Unfortunately, the bill was amended to make all petition deadlines for new parties and independent candidates earlier than they had been.
The new deadline for an independent presidential candidate (or the presidential nominee of an unqualified party) moves from 140 days before the general election, to 155 days before the general election. Assuming the bill is signed, the 2012 deadline will be June 4. Colorado already had the nation’s second-earliest deadline for independent presidential candidates (only Texas is earlier) and the new deadline would probably be unconstitutional if challenged in court. Other states in which later independent candidate deadlines have been held unconstitutional are Alaska, Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. Ironically, the current Secretary of State of Colorado, Scott Gessler, was in private practice as an attorney before he was elected Secretary of State, and in 2004 he won a lawsuit on behalf of Socialist Party presidential candidate Walt Brown over the former Secretary of State’s refusal to accept Brown’s paperwork on July 4. Brown had slid the paperwork under the Secretary of State’s locked door on that date, which was the deadline, but the former Secretary of State had refused to accept it. Gessler won a state court order that Brown should be put on the ballot.
The bill also moves the petition deadline for a new party to the second Friday in January. Generally, newly-qualifying parties do not nominate by convention, although if two candidates for the same office received a significant vote at the newly-qualifying party’s convention, state law does provide for a primary for that party for just that one office. Such primaries are extremely rare in Colorado. The bill also moves the petition deadline for non-presidential independents to 155 days before the general election, and says that the nominating conventions of ballot-qualified minor parties must be no later than 73 days before the primary.
On May 6, Michael Chamness filed his motion for summary judgment in Chamness v Bowen, the federal case against two particular details of the California top-two system. The case attacks California’s discriminatory policy on ballot labels. It also attacks the new California law that says even though write-in space is to be printed on the ballot in Congressional and state office November elections, and even though the ballot doesn’t warn voters that any write-ins won’t be counted, in fact write-ins cannot be counted.
No declaratory judgment on either of these complaints has yet been issued by any California court, state or federal. The only action so far has been a denial of injunctive relief in various California special elections that have been held this year. Proponents of the top-two system, including almost all of California’s large daily newspapers, have generally not reported on these particular details about the top-two law, and have given little publicity to this lawsuit.
Dr. Edward Shadid, 43, a spinal surgeon, was elected to the city council of Oklahoma City on April 5, 2011. The election was non-partisan. He had run for the legislature as a Green Party nominee in 2010, and had polled 10.5% in a race against a Democrat and a Republican. Because the Green Party has never been on the ballot, he was on the 2010 ballot as an independent.
Here is a news story about his winning a seat on the city council last month. Several hundred thousand dollars in independent expenditures were spent against him, but he still won the April run-off with 62% of the vote. UPDATE: he is a registered Independent, according to the Oklahoma County Election Board. the newspaper story is incorrect when it says he is a Democrat. Neither he, nor anyone else in Oklahoma, is permitted to be registered “Green”.
