On March 14, a lower state court in Arizona ruled that Charlie Manolakis should remain on the Green Party primary ballot, in the upcoming special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat, 8th district. See this story. Manolakis produced evidence that he is a registered member of the Green Party, and has been since last month. The challenge to his spot on the ballot was based on the misinformation that he is not a registered Green Party member.
This article mentions some of the wealthy individuals and companies that are contributing to the Arizona initiative to impose a top-two system in that state.
Nevada requires that statewide initiatives obtain a substantial number of signatures from each U.S. House district in the state. On March 14, the 9th circuit upheld the Nevada distribution requirement for initiative petitions. Angle v Miller, 10-16707. Here is the 20-page decision. The decision was not surprising. As noted in the decision, there are no precedents invalidating distribution requirements for statewide petitions, if the units are of equal population.
On March 12, a California Superior Court in Shasta County issued a 4-page order in Shasta County Citizens for Justice v City of Shasta Lake, cv-174130. Recently, a recall petition was circulated to recall a city council member in the city of Shasta Lake. The councilmember obtained evidence that someone who is not a resident of Shasta Lake helped circulate the petition. UPDATE: here is the decision.
The councilmember asked the court to order the city not to hold the recall. But the court declined to stop that election. The judge wrote, “Even assuming there was evidence that signatures were gathered by a non-resident circulator, there is no statutory or constitutional authority for the Court to enjoin a recall election on the ground that signatures on a recall petition were obtained by a non-resident petition circulator. The statutory scheme for remedies relating to improper signature gathering is to hold the circulator accountable, not the signator.”
California and Pennsylvania are the only states that still try to enforce in-district, or in-jurisdiction, residence requirements on circulators. Recently, some California elections officials have warned circulators of in-lieu of filing petitions that the circulator must be a resident of the county and district. This has been frustrating, because the constitutionality of the California in-district residency requirement is pending in federal court, and the Secretary of State has told the court that the residency requirement is not enforced. However, she has not communicated that to county elections officials.
Maine Representative Les Fossel has introduced LD 1879, which would require “party formation committees” to meet the same campaign contribution disclosure laws that other types of political groups must follow. The bill is co-sponsored by nine other legislators, including the Speaker of the House, Robert Nutting. All of the sponsors are Republicans except for Representative Teresa Hayes, who is a Democrat.
Maine law already provides that when a group wishes to qualify a new party for the ballot, it must submit a Declaration of Intent, which must be signed by at least ten voters. The provisions of LD 1879 seem to only relate to those ten individuals. If the intent of the bill is to require Americans Elect to disclose the names of contributors who are paying for petitioning, the bill seems powerless to accomplish that, and this would seem to be true, even if the bill had been enacted in the past and was already in effect. There seems to be no reason to believe that the contributions for paid petitioners would necessarily go through the ten individuals who signed the “Declaration of Intent” to qualify a new party. The existing law, section 303, says, “Ten or more voters who are not enrolled in a party qualified under section 301 must file a declaration of intent to form a party with the Secretary of State”, but nothing says that those ten individuals are necessarily the people who are arranging for paid petitioners.
