See this you tube of a Spanish TV ad, produced to encourage voter turnout. Thanks to Fred Silverman for the link.
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On November 19, a U.S. District Court in Alaska issued a ruling in Joe Miller’s lawsuit against the state of Alaska over vote-counting. The U.S. District Court said the case belongs in state court, not federal court. The judge told the Alaska Division of Elections not to certify Lisa Murkowski’s win in the U.S. Semate race until after the state court has received the case. However, the federal judge also said that if Miller does not file in state court by November 22, the Elections Division is then free to certify the results. See this story. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link. Here is the federal court order. The case is Miller v Campbell, 3:10-cv-0252.
On November 16, the state of Arizona asked for a rehearing before all the active judges of the 9th circuit in Gonzalez v State of Arizona, 08-17094. This is the case that challenges a state law that requires newly-registering voters to submit a birth certificate, or a naturalization certificate, with the voter registration application. On Octrober 26, a 3-judge panel had struck down that law by a vote of 2-1, finding that the federal Motor Voter law precludes states from requiring such additional documents. The 3-judge panel had included Sandra Day O’Connor. Some retired U.S. Supreme Court justices do sit on U.S. Court of Appeals panels once in a while. The vote of the original 3-judge panel had been 2-1, with O’Connor in the majority.
In the November 2010 election, eleven states elected people to federal or state office who were not nominees of either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. This is the largest number of such states since 1922, when there were fourteen such states.
The eleven states in 2010 are: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wisconsin. This assumes that Lisa Murkowski has been elected to the U.S. Senate.
In the 20th and 21st centuries combined, the even-numbered year with the fewest states that elected someone who wasn’t either a Democratic nominee or a Republican nominee to federal or state office was 1954, when South Carolina and Connecticut were the only such states. The year with the most such states was 1914, when there were 24 such states.
Belarus holds its presidential election on December 19, 2010. The term is for 7 years. Ten candidates qualified for the ballot, despite the harsh ballot access law that requires 100,000 signatures. See this story. Belarus has a population of 9,850,000, and is one of the few nations of the world that has imitated the United States by requiring hundreds of thousands of signatures for presidential candidates to appear on the ballot.
The incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, is running for re-election. He has held the presidency since 1994. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link.