The District of Columbia is holding a special election on Tuesday, April 26, to fill a vacancy in the At-Large City Council seat, and also two seats on the Board of Education. On April 15, a U.S. District Court declined to order the Board of Elections to either move the date of the election to another day, or to extend voting hours from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. A lawsuit had been filed on April 13, arguing that Orthodox Jews are not able to vote at the polls on election day because April 26 is the last day of Passover. Herzfeld v D.C. Board of Elections, 1:11-cv-721.

Passover ends at 8:40 p.m., so if the hours for voting had been extended until 10 p.m., the problem would have resolved itself. The judge noted that anyone can participate in early voting. Also he said if the lawsuit had been filed as soon as the Board of Elections had set the election date, then he would have ordered an extension of voting hours. See this story.

The election for City Council-at-Large is a partisan election, but because it is a special election, parties don’t choose nominees. The ballot lists six Democrats, one Republican, one Green, and one independent candidate. The Green candidate is Alan Page.

Maine requires a ballot-qualified party to hold at least one municipal caucus in each of the 16 counties of the state, in the spring of each even-numbered year. Independent Maine representative Ben Chipman, who is closely associated with the Green Party, earlier this year introduced LD 142, to change the requirement so that parties are only obliged to hold caucuses within any 12 counties, instead of all 16. The bill passed the Joint Committee on State and Local Government last month, but it has been stalled ever since. This Portland Daily Sun story describes the bill and the trouble that it is having.

Maine is the only state that requires a political party to have organizations within every county. In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee that states cannot tell parties how to be organized. Specifically, the co-plaintiff Libertarian Party of California in that case was granted the freedom to organize itself on a regional basis (the party created its own regions), and to be free of a state election law that required organization on a county basis.

Wyoming lets a petition to recognize a new party start circulating on April 1 of the odd year before the election. The petition is due on June 1 of the election year, so the state allows 14 months. The Constitution Party has never before qualified as a party in Wyoming, but it is determined to be on in 2012, and started on the first possible date. It now has 200 signatures toward the requirement of 3,734 valid signatures.