On September 29, Ohio Democrats and their allies, especially labor unions, submitted 318,460 signatures, asking for a referendum on HB 194. That is the omnibus election law bill passed by this year’s legislature. Because no one knows if there are enough valid signatures yet, the existence of the petition means that HB 194 can’t take effect yet. If the petition has at least 231,147 valid signatures, the bill is suspended until after the November 2012 election, and the public will vote on it in November 2012. Even if the petition doesn’t have enough valid signatures, the bill can’t take effect until the petition has been checked. The checking process will take at least three weeks.

HB 194 was the bill that supposedly gave Ohio a constitutional ballot access law for minor parties. The original law had been declared unconstitutional in 2006, mostly because it required the signatures for minor party qualification to be submitted in November of the year before the election. HB 194 had moved the petition deadline from four months before the primary, to three months before the primary. Now that change can’t take effect, for a while at least. All of this makes it even more likely than before that the Secretary of State will now recognize Americans Elect, the Constitution Party, the Green Party, and the Socialist Party, for the 2012 election. Because a U.S. District Court on September 7, 2011, had already enjoined the new February petition deadline, saying it was still too early, chances had already looked good that all the minor parties would be on the 2012 ballot. But now the chances are even higher, because the new statutory petition deadline reverts to November 2011, the same deadline that was already tossed out by the 6th circuit in 2006.

The Census Bureau has released “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2010”. The report can be seen at this link. The Census Bureau has been preparing this report for many decades. A new report is released after each Congressional election. The data is from surveys, not from election returns statistics.

Oregon, Washington, and Maine, have the highest participation. Oregon and Washington are the only two states that send ballots in the postal mail to all registered voters (although in 2010, Washington state had one county that didn’t do that). And Maine, in 2010, was one of the states with election day registration. Ironically, the Maine legislature repealed provision for election-day registration this year, but that change isn’t in effect because a referendum petition was filed to let voters vote on election-day registration in November 2012.