On Thursday, January 26, two important legislative hearings will take place in California. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee will meet at 1:30 pm in Room 263 of City Hall to hear two bills on Instant Runoff Voting. One bill would eliminate it; the other bill would preserve it and expand the number of choices for voters. Currently voters are limited to a First, Second and Third Choice vote. UPDATE: the hearing time has been changed to 2:30 pm.

Also on January 26, the California Assembly Elections Committee will hear AB 1413 sometime in the morning, in room 3162 of the State Capitol. The bill would delete write-in space on general election ballots for Congress and partisan state office. The bill has already passed the State Senate. The Committee won’t say what time the hearing is; instead the hearing will be held as soon as the Assembly floor session ends, which will probably be in the mid-morning.

Mikhail Prokhorov has been put on the ballot for the Russian Presidential election, to be held in March. He is one of five candidates who qualified. He needed 2,000,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot, and he obtained them. See this story.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson will hear Lux v Judd at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, January 25, in Richmond, Virginia. This is the case over the constitutionality of Virginia’s law, requiring circulators for U.S. House candidates to be residents of that U.S. House district. Judge Hudson, on August 26, 2010, had refused to enjoin this law, saying it was very likely to be held constitutional. The 4th circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court had then also refused injunctive relief.

But then, on July 6, 2011, the 4th circuit had issued an opinion in this case saying the U.S. District Court had improperly relied on an obsolete 1985 precedent, and that the case law has changed since 1985. The 4th circuit said “we can no longer say that an in-district witness requirement is necessarily justified by a state’s desire to gauge the depth of a candidate’s support.” The 4th circuit sent the case back to Judge Hudson to give the state a chance to come up with another reason for the residency requirement.

After that, on January 10, 2012, another U.S. District Court in the eastern district of Virginia ruled that Virginia almost certainly can’t even enforce an in-state residency requirement for petitioners. That ruling was in Perry v Judd. It will be interesting to see how vigorously the state defends the in-district residency requirement in the Lux oral argument. Anyone who lives near Richmond, Virginia, might enjoy attending the hearing.