Thanks to the Texas Redistricting Blog, here is a funny editorial cartoon about the status of the Texas redistricting situation. The cartoon is by John Branch and ran in the San Antonio Express-News.
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The February 1, 2012 Ballot Access News (paper edition) is finally in the postal mail to the subscribers. It was late because of problems finding a shop to print it. The normal printer was on vacation and his vacation got extended unexpectedly. The issue has the story about the February 3 ballot access victory in Tennessee, so in a sense it’s a more interesting issue because it is a little bit late. If it had been on time, it would have missed that story.
Because most states purge their voter registration rolls between elections, the United States has fewer registered voters now than in October 2010. There are fewer Democrats now, fewer Republicans now, fewer independent voters now, and fewer voters in each nationally-organized minor party now. The nationally-organized parties that existed in 2010 and that have as many as 500 registrants in the nation are the Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Working Families, Reform, Socialist, and Socialist Workers Parties, in that order.
Americans Elect did not exist in 2010, and now has 3,285 registrants, so it is the only nationally-organized party that now has more registrants than in 2010.
UPDATE: an earlier version of this post said that Massachusetts had converted the state’s registered Libertarians to independents. The earlier version was mistaken about that. Massachusetts had 10,839 Libertarians registrants as of December 31, 2011. When that figure is added into the national Libertarian total, the Libertarians don’t have as many registrants nationally as they had had in October 2010, but they only declined by 390 nationwide.
See this story, which says that on February 3, a U.S. District Court Judge ruled that the city of Boerne, Texas, may revert to district elections for city council. For a while, some time ago, Boerne was under court order to use cumulative voting, in which council candidates run at-large and voters have three votes and may distribute them any way they wish, including casting all three votes for a single candidate. The voter who filed the lawsuit says he will appeal again.
At 2:28 a.m. on February 4, an Indiana criminal jury convicted Secretary of State Charlie White of registering and voting at an address which wasn’t his real residence. See this story. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link. The judge will decide whether White is now convicted of felonies or misdemeanors.