The Americans Elect web page has this brief announcement that the May 8 round of voting for a presidential candidate will not take place. Instead the first vote will be on May 15. This postponement is because no candidate, neither a declared candidate nor a draft candidate, received enough clicks to qualify.
Clicks that have already been cast will continue to count for the May 15 vote.
On April 30, the Missouri Senate Finance & Government Operations & Elections Committee passed HB 1046. It requires political parties that wish to have a presidential candidate on the November ballot to furnish copies of the birth certificates of both the presidential and vice-presidential candidate, within 7 days after the nominee is chosen. If it is signed into law, it will go into effect on August 28, 2012. The Democratic national convention is later than that date. The bill has already passed the House.
The bill also requires presidential primary candidates to furnish their birth certificates, and also requires declared write-in presidential candidates to do the same. But it does not apply to independent presidential candidates.
Political science professor Todd Donovan recently published an article in The California Journal of Politics & Policy, titled, “The Top Two Primary: What Can California Learn from Washington?” The article is in Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012. The last sentence of the Abstract is, “Whatever the cause of the changes, the partisan structure of Washington’s legislature appears unaltered by the new primary system.”
The article concludes that when Washington state started using a top two system in 2008, the change did not create a legislature that “looked different or functioned differently from the legislature elected under a partisan primary.”
On May 1, Public Policy Polling released this poll for the presidential election in Virginia. When Virgil Goode, Constitution Party nominee, is included, the results are: President Obama 50%, Mitt Romney 38%, Virgil Goode 5%, other or undecided 7%. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
On May 1, the American Civil Liberties Union and many other public interest groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of some Pennsylvania voters who do not possess government-photo ID cards. See this press release, which has links to the complaint and details about the individual voter plaintiffs.
Most of the recently passed state photo-ID laws from southern states have been blocked this year by the Voting Rights Section of the U.S. Justice Department. But most states are not covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, so whether these laws may go into effect depends on the outcome of state court lawsuits, such as this one. So far the Wisconsin photo-ID law passed this year has been blocked by state courts in Wisconsin. The new Pennsylvania case is called Applewhite v Commonwealth.
