Carey Campbell of Virginia is organizing a committee to draft Michael Bloomberg for president. See this press release.
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The New York state November 2010 ballot (in counties outside New York city) will look like this.
Note that this is a paper ballot. It could have been arranged so that each party has its own row. Or it could have been arranged to dispense with rows or columns, and instead been printed in an “office group” format, in which all candidates for one particular office are listed together under the title of each office in turn.
However, this paper ballot arbitrarily creates one row for seven parties (Democratic, Republican, Independence, Conservative, Working Families, Green, and Rent is 2 Damn High). Then it squeezes each of the other four parties into dual rows. Therefore, the Libertarian and Freedom Parties share a row, and the Anti-Prohibition and Taxpayer Parties share another row.
There was some justification for such a ballot design when New York used mechanical voting machines. The face of the voting machine only had room for nine rows or nine columns. But there is no justification whatsoever for that ballot format when all ballots are printed pieces of paper.
If the Credico lawsuit wins, then Randy Credico will be featured in the Anti-Prohibition Party row as well as the Libertarian Party row, and voters can choose which line to vote for him on. But the basic bad ballot design will still be a problem.
On October 7, a Commonwealth Court heard In re Nomination Petition of Carl Stevenson again. This is the case over whether an independent candidate for the legislature should be on the ballot. The first time this case had been in Commonwealth Court, the Commonwealth Court Judge had ruled that signatures collected by someone who lives outside the district are invalid. Then the State Supreme Court had ruled that the Commonwealth Court should look at the petition again, and this time check all the signatures, even those collected by the out-of-district circulators.
Another Commonwealth Court judge had the case this time, and he ruled that signatures by out-of-district circulators are valid. But then, having looked at all signatures, he ruled that the candidate still doesn’t have enough signatures. See this story.
On October 6, the Nevada Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit filed by Citizens Outreach to remove Scott Ashjian, Tea Party candidate for U.S. Senate, from the ballot. See this story. If the Citizens Outreach lawsuit had prevailed, that would have had the effect of vastly increasing the difficulty of getting a new party on the Nevada ballot, and would have disqualified the Green Party as well as the Tea Party. The case is Burdish v Miller, 56795. The Nevada Supreme Court 5-page decision does not reach the merits of the case, but just says that the lower court was correct when it ruled that a case of this type should have been filed much sooner than it was filed.
The earlier case to remove Scott Ashjian from the ballot is still pending in the State Supreme Court, but it is clear that the decision, when it comes, will not affect this year’s ballot. The other case is Fasano v Miller, no. 56040.
Last month, the Conservative and Working Families Party of New York state filed a federal lawsuit, challenging the state’s policy on counting ballots when a voter casts two votes for a single office, and both votes are for the same candidate. The state says it will count such ballots as votes for the party with the higher position on the ballot. For example, if a candidate is the nominee of the Republican Party and the Conservative Party, and a voter votes for that candidate under both party lines, only the Republican vote would count.
The lawsuit does not say what the state should do in that situation, but it argues that the state’s policy is discriminatory and unconstitutional.
On September 29, the Independence Party of New York city filed an amicus curiae brief on the side of the Conservative and Working Families Party. The state officers of the Independence Party seem not to have taken a position on the lawsuit. The officers of the Independence Party of New York city and the officers of the statewide Independence Party are somewhat hostile to each other.