On February 1, the Nebraska Senate Government, Military & Veterans Affairs Committee will hear LB 757, the bill to make it easier for a party to remain ballot-qualified. The bill says if a party meets the 5% vote test, it then remains on the ballot for the next two elections, instead of just the next election.
On January 26, the Freedom Socialist Party announced that it has nominated its first national ticket. The presidential nominee is Stephen Durham of New York, and the vice-presidential nominee is Christina Lopez of Washington state. See here for more about the ticket.
The Freedom Socialist Party has run nominees for various public offices starting in 1991. It has had candidates for Congress, state legislature, or city office, in California, New York, Oregon, and Washington. Thanks to IndependentPoliticalReport for the link.
On January 27, Texas Governor Rick Perry asked to withdraw from the lawsuit Perry v Judd, 12-1067, the case in the 4th circuit over Virginia’s ban on out-of-state circulators. However, Newt Gingrich, who had intervened in the lawsuit last month, will keep the case alive.
The U.S. District Court in this case had ruled that the out-of-state circulator ban is almost certainly unconstitutional, but that Perry and the other intervening presidential candidates had filed the lawsuit too late to get injunctive relief. Perry had appealed the denial of injunctive relief, but the 4th circuit had agreed that he had filed the case too late. The 4th circuit has not yet expressed an opinion about the constitutionality of the state ban on out-of-state circulators, but will probably do so fairly soon. Briefs on that issue are all due by March 30, 2012. In the meantime, it seems likely that the legislature will repeal the ban on petitioners who live in Virginia but who circulate outside their home district, but will retain the ban on out-of-state circulators.
Kent Bernbeck, a Nebraska resident who has been active for 20 years to protect the initiative process in that state, has launched an initiative petition that would amend the state constitution, so as to return the number of signatures required for statewide initiatives and referenda to the standard that was in effect before 1994.
Before 1994, Nebraska initiatives required signatures equal in number to 10% of the last gubernatorial vote, to amend the State Constitution; and 7% of the last gubernatorial vote, to amend a statute. A statewide referendum petition needed 5% of the last gubernatorial vote. But, in 1994, the State Supreme Court ruled in Duggan v Beermann, 515 NW 2d 788, that the actual base of the percentages should be the number of registered voters, not the last gubernatorial vote. Back when the initiative and referendum has first existed in Nebraska in 1912, most counties didn’t require voter registration so it was impossible to base the requirement on the number of registered voters. By 1988, when voter registration was established throughout the state, one of the Constitution’s references to the number of signatures was changed inadvertently to the number of registered voters, but another section of the State Constitution was not changed, so the situation was ambiguous, and the State Supreme Court resolved it unfavorably to initiative proponents.
Bernback had an op-ed in the January 27 Omaha World-Herald about his new petition to restore the base for the percentage as the gubernatorial vote. One of the worst aspects of the existing law is that proponents of an initiative or referendum can’t even know how many signatures they need, while they are working on their petition, because the number depends on how many registered voters there are when they submit the petition.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has recently visited Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, where she has addressed civic groups, local judges and attorneys, and other public gatherings. See this Saipan Tribune article about the trip’s conclusion. This article, and other articles about the visit, imply that she is the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice to visit these U.S. territories while in office.
The U.S. is in violation of several international human rights agreements for refusing to let U.S. adult citizens who live in its possessions vote for President, as well as for denying them any voting representatives in the national legislature. By contrast, France and the Netherlands, the only other nations with populous overseas possessions, grant full voting rights in their national elections to residents of those places (“populous” in this context means a place with at least 70,000 residents).
Sotomayor’s roots are in Puerto Rico, so it is natural that she may be more interested in this voting rights issue than any other U.S. Supreme Court Justice. The U.S. Supreme Court has been rejecting all voting rights cases filed by residents of U.S. possessions for three decades, and there have been many such appeals, especially from Puerto Rico. Maybe that will change in the future. Thanks to How Appealing for the link. UPDATE: a Virgin Islands resident filed a constitutional complaint against the U.S. government on September 20, 2011, Michael Charles v U.S. Federal Election Commission, superior court of Virgin Islands, St. Thomas division, 505/2011. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the news of the Virgin Islands case.
