On January 27, a U.S. District Court Judge in Albany, New York, issued an opinion, setting the date of New York’s 2012 primary for congressional office on the fourth Tuesday of June, which will be June 26 in 2012. The state is free to decide whether to move its primary for state and local office to that date, or to leave it in September. The case is U.S.A. v State of New York, 1:10-cv-1214.

The basis for the decision is that a June date better protects the interest of overseas absentee ballots. The deadline for candidates running in a congressional primary to submit petitions will be April 26. The state hasn’t even drawn the U.S. House district boundaries. It is now somewhat plausible that the legislature will ease the petitioning burden for primary candidates, at least for 2012. Thanks to Tony Roza for this news.

On January 27, a 3-judge U.S. District Court in San Antonio that is hearing the redistricting lawsuit held a status conference that lasted seven hours. At the conclusion, the judges said that if the plaintiffs and the defendants can agree on new district boundaries for U.S. House and legislature by February 6, then the April 3 primary can proceed. Otherwise, it will be postponed.

In the meantime, the deadline for candidates to file for the primary will be re-opened, but when it will be re-opened is not determined. Previously there had been an agreement that it would re-open February 1, but that date is now defunct and the new date will be settled later.

On January 27, the Massachusetts Attorney General filed this brief in the State Supreme Court, in the lawsuit over whether the election law either permits or forbids using a stand-in presidential candidate on the ballot access petition of an unqualified party. The hearing will be February 9.

The state’s brief is quite long, but it never mentions that the Massachusetts Secretary of State approved vice-presidential stand-ins on petitions in 1980, 2000, and 2004, and presidential stand-ins in 1995. The brief does mention, in footnote six, that the Secretary of State’s office told the Massachusetts Libertarian Party in October 2007 that the office would prepare a form designed to facilitate presidential stand-ins, but says a promise to prepare a form for that purpose doesn’t really mean that the state would permit it. This is perhaps the weakest aspect of the state’s position, that it tricked the party into thinking presidential substitution would be permitted, and then, when it was too late, said it wasn’t permitted.

The state’s brief, like all the state’s briefs in this lengthy series of lawsuits, is sarcastic. It never refers to presidential substitution without using quotation marks around the word “substitution.” Massachusetts officials may not know this, but many other states permit presidential stand-ins on petitions, including Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Furthermore, almost every state permitted vice-presidential substitution in 1980 for John B. Anderson’s campaign.