On January 9, 2012, Monday, a U.S. District Court will hear oral arguments in Green Party of Tennessee v Hargett, the lawsuit that challenges the new ballot access law passed by the Tennessee legislature this year. In 2010, the same judge who has this case, William J. Haynes, had declared the old law unconstitutional.

In response to the 2010 court decision, the 2011 session of the legislature did not lower the number of signatures (40,042 for 2012, 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote). It did move the deadline for a party to submit these signatures from late March to early April of the election year. And it removed the wording on the petition that says all the signers are members. The plaintiffs argue that these improvements are much too minor to save the law.

Election law professor Justin Levitt has a comprehensive web page, “All About Redistricting”. See it at redistricting.lls.edu. Among other features, it has information about all known lawsuits involving redistricting since the 2010 census results came out.

The November 20 Los Angeles Times has this article on Americans Elect. The reporter focuses on trying to determine the motives of the people who launched it, and on balance concludes that there is nothing conspiratorial about its origins, and that its backers have no hidden agenda to injure either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

The article, near the end, has an error when it says that the directors of Americans Elect can veto the choice of the voters in the Americans Elect primary. It says the directors can remove a ticket if it is not centrist. This is doubly in error. First, using the Ron Paul example that the reporter used, if Ron Paul won the Americans Elect primary and chose a Democrat for vice-president, then Paul’s nomination is guaranteed because the rules say a ticket composed of a Republican and a Democrat is “deemed” to be “balanced.” And even if Ron Paul won the Americans Elect presidential primary and chose a member of a minor party, or an independent, the directors could not veto that ticket on the grounds that it is not “centrist.” They could only scrutinize it to see if it is “balanced”, which is entirely different. Thus, if Ron Paul won the Americans Elect presidential primary and chose a registered independent (for example, Ralph Nader), that ticket would be evaluated to see if it is “balanced”, not “centrist.” Most neutral observers would probably agree that a Paul-Nader ticket is “balanced”, but not “centrist.”