On January 19, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., heard arguments in Shelby County, Alabama v Holder. This is one of several cases challenging section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act. Section five requires certain parts of the nation to get U.S. Justice Department approval before changing election laws. According to this story, two of the three judges seemed skeptical of Shelby County’s arguments.
Newspapers in Texas seem to have just noticed that the Democratic Party’s lawsuit against the Green Party was settled, back on December 17, 2011. This news was blogged on this web page more than a month ago, and was also in the January 1, 2012 print edition of Ballot Access News. See this recent story in the Texas Tribune.
As has been reported earlier, Stephen Colbert is not on the ballot in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, but he holds himself out as a candidate in that primary. Write-ins are not allowed, so Colbert is asking his voters to vote for Herman Cain, who is on the ballot. Cain seems happy with this and is even planning a joint appearance in South Carolina with Colbert, according to this story.
But the story also says the Democratic Party of South Carolina is unhappy with Colbert, and urges non-Republicans not to vote in the Republican presidential primary. Unlike Virginia Democrats, who don’t have a presidential primary, South Carolina Democrats do have a presidential primary, but only President Obama is on their ballot.
On January 19, the Arkansas Secretary of State said that the Green Party has enough valid signatures on its petition. 10,000 were needed, and the party had submitted 14,000. Arkansas will now have four ballot-qualified parties on its 2012 ballot. Already on were the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian Parties. This is the first time Arkansas will have had as many as four ballot-qualified parties for all partisan office, since 1971, when the state started requiring petitions for minor party ballot access.
Arkansas has separate procedures for minor parties that only want to be on the ballot for President. That presidential procedure only requires 1,000 signatures. Americans Elect had already qualified for the 2012 Arkansas presidential ballot, and chances are another four or five parties will qualify in Arkansas for President.
On January 19, the 9th circuit upheld the Washington state “top-two” system. Here is the decision.
The part of the decision about ballot access is very short. It quotes the dicta from the U.S. Supreme Court decision Munro v Socialist Workers Party that says the burden on minor parties is slight as long as their candidates can run in the primary. But it does not mention the holding in Munro v Socialist Workers Party, that there is no constitutional distinction between a petition for ballot access to the November ballot, and a prior vote test.
It says, “We recognize the possibility that I-872 makes it more difficult for minor-party candidates to qualify for the general election ballot than regulations permitting a minor-party candidate to qualify for a general election ballot by filing a required number of petition signatures. This additional burden, however, is an inherent feature of any top two primary system, and the Supreme Court has expressly approved of top two primary systems. See California Democratic Party v Jones, 530 U.S. 567, 585-86 (2000).”
The U.S. Supreme Court did not expressly approve of top-two systems in the 2000 decision that struck down blanket primaries. Justice Scalia wrote the 2000 decision that struck down the California blanket primary, and he added that a non-partisan system with no party labels would be constitutional. It is obvious that Justice Scalia did not mean in his dicta to approve of the type of top-two system used by California and Washington currently, because he dissented in the March 2008 decision Washington State Grange v Washington State Republican Party.
The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t think, in its March 2008 opinion, that the ballot access issue had been settled by the 2000 California blanket primary case. Otherwise, the March 2008 decision would not have included footnote eleven, which says the ballot access issue has not been decided and must be decided by lower courts.
The 9th circuit decision is also factually wrong, in the part of the decision that discusses freedom of association. The decision says, of the experimental evidence about voting confusion, that the ballots in the experiment differed from actual Washington state ballots. The decision is factually mistaken. The experimental ballots were an exact copy of actual Washington state ballots.
