The British Electoral Commission has published an explanation of the upcoming May 5, 2011 vote on Instant-Runoff Voting for members of the House of Commons. Here is the booklet intended for voters in England. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
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On March 15, the Idaho House State Affairs Committee introduced HB 275, which is another of the Secretary of State’s omnibus election law bills. Among the many election law changes is a provision lowering the number of signatures for an independent presidential candidate from 1% of the last presidential vote (currently 6,552 signatures) to exactly 1,000 signatures.
No Green Party presidential nominee has ever been on the ballot in Idaho. However, assuming this bill passes, it seems likely that whomever the Green Party nominates for President in 2012 will be able to comply with this requirement. The bill has no direct impact on the Libertarian or Constitution Parties, because they are already ballot-qualified parties.
On March 15, the Tennessee Senate State and Local Government passed SB 935, which makes slight improvements to ballot access for minor parties. It moves the petition deadline for the petition to qualify a new party from March to early April, and deletes the requirement that says the petition says signers are members of the party. See this story. The bill does not lower the number of signatures, 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote. For 2012 and 2014, this would be 40,042 valid signatures. The story is wrong to say the bill requires 60,000 signatures.
The story’s author asserts that the bill cures the constitutional defects in Tennessee’s procedure to get a new party on the ballot, but the author is mistaken. The September 2010 decision of a U.S. District Court, invalidating the existing law, emphasized that a petition deadline four months before the primary is unconstitutional, but the bill’s deadline would still be four months before the August primary. Read the part of the decision on pages 33 through 37.
On March 15, the 9th circuit heard oral arguments in Dudum v City and County of San Francisco. This is a federal case, filed in 2010 by opponents of San Francisco’s version of Instant-Runoff Voting. Because the San Francisco vote-counting equipment is not as flexible as it might be, San Francisco’s system limits voters to a first choice, second choice, and third choice, when they vote for city officials. Opponents of IRV filed the lawsuit, arguing that the limit on the number of choices is unconstitutional. This San Francisco Chronicle article says that the three judges seemed skeptical of that argument. The IRV opponents lost this case in U.S. District Court.
The three judges on the case are Richard Paez and Marsha Berzon, Clinton appointees, and Carlos Bea, a Bush Jr. appointee. All three judges are Californians. The law firm representing the opponents of IRV is the same law firm that represents former California Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, in the two lawsuits currently challenging certain aspects of California’s top-two system. This is ironic, because according to the newspaper story, this law firm in Dudum v City and County of San Francisco is emphasizing that the U.S. Constitution requires that all votes be counted. And yet in the two pending cases against certain aspects of Proposition 14, the same law firm is arguing that it is constitutional to provide write-in space on ballots and yet not only not count write-ins, but not even count how many write-ins were cast. Under California’s Proposition 14, a write-in winner could win in November and even then those write-ins would not be counted. UPDATE: here is another newspaper story about the hearing.
On March 14, Texas Representative Leo Berman withdrew his bill, HB 418. This is the bill that would have imposed filing fees on candidates who get on the November ballot by petition and by convention, i.e., independent candidates and the nominees of minor parties. The Texas minor parties had done a good job of organizing opposition to this bill at its hearing on March 7. Thanks to IndependentPoliticalReport for this news.