On May 24, U.S. District Court Judge William K. Watkins will hold a hearing in Stein v Chapman, the ballot access case that challenge’s Alabama’s March petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties to get on the ballot. The hearing is at 2 p.m. in Courtroom 2-E in Montgomery’s federal courthouse.
The Colorado primary is June 26. El Paso County election officials decided not to print up any primary ballots for the Democratic Party or the American Constitution Party, because those two parties have no primary contests within the boundaries of the county. But the Colorado Secretary of State believes each county must print up primary ballots for all three parties that are entitled to nominate by primary. See this story. The Secretary of State apparently will sue the county to get a judicial decision on this issue.
El Paso County is a populous county that contains Colorado Springs.
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.”
