New Hampshire voters will choose a new state representative on September 6, in the Rockingham County 14th State House district. Here is a Seabrook, New Hampshire newspaper story about Brendan Kelly, the Libertarian nominee. In November 2010, he had run for the same seat, and polled 24.63% in a race in which both major parties also had nominees. In the upcoming special election, Kelly has received endorsements from some Republican leaders.
Jeff Girard, who specializes in interviewing people about poltical and social issues while he and the guest are seated together in his car, has interviewed Richard Winger about election law issues.
University of Texas Law School Professor Joseph R. Fishkin has written this eleven-page article. It argues that if states permit write-in voting, then those states have an obligation not to throw roadblocks in the path of voters who wish to count a write-in vote. The article seems to have been triggered by last year’s litigation in Alaska, around the write-in candidacy of Lisa Murkowski in the general election. The Alaska Republican Party, seeking to block the write-in campaign, had argued in court that election officials should not be permitted to help any voters (even those who asked) know how to spell “Murkowski.”
Forty-five of the fifty states permit write-in votes in the general election. However, some states include counties that routinely discard all write-in votes without counting them (especially Pennsylvania). The District of Columbia refuses to tally votes even for declared write-in presidential candidates. And only a minority of states post at the polls a list of the declared write-in candidates. Finally, California, under the new top-two law, allows write-in space in November for Congress and partisan state office, but says such write-ins may never be counted.
The Fishkin article was recently published in Alaska Law Review, vol. 28, no. 29.
The Federal Election Commission always publishes a book of official election returns, after any regularly-scheduled congressional election. The book is always called “Federal Elections (followed by the year).” The FEC has just posted its on-line version of the 2010 book. See this link. A chart in the book shows that 5.45% of the November 2010 U.S. House vote went to “other”; the other 94.55% went to the two major parties. The printed book is not yet available, but it will be in a few weeks. The FEC does not charge for copies of the book. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
Scotusblog is the best-known and most prestigious blog for neutral, objective information about activities of the U.S. Supreme Court. The authors of the blog regularly examine all the cert petitions and report on those which seem to have some reasonable chance of getting the attention of the Court. The August 19 “petition of the day” is the New Hampshire Libertarian Party case, 11-119. The issue is whether the Constitution protects a party’s name, when party names are printed on a ballot.
In 2008 the New Hampshire Secretary of State listed two presidential candidates on the November ballot with the label “Libertarian”, one of whom was the party’s nominee and one of whom was not. The party sued, but the lower courts ruled that the U.S. Constitution’s freedom of association clause contains no protection for party names on the ballot. By contrast, the 10th circuit had ruled in 1984 that parties do have an ability to protect their names from being printed on the ballot next to the names of candidates who were not nominated by that party. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
