Brookfield, Connecticut, like all cities and towns in Connecticut, has partisan local elections. According to this story, Brookfield also has a law that requires that appointed commissioners may not all be from the same political party. Currently the only qualified parties for Brookfield elections are the Democratic and Republican Parties. However, Republicans are in the process of creating a new municipal party called the Brookfield Party. Assuming the party polls at least 1% of the vote in the November 2009 election, members of that party will be eligible to serve on the minority slots on town commissions. That way, there will be no legal obligation that Democrats be appointed to any of those slots.

According to this story, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler wants the legislature to provide that when a write-in voter forgets, or doesn’t know, to “X” the box next to the name just written in, that vote should be invalid. Ironically, just this month, California changed its policy in the opposite direction, to say that these type of write-ins are valid.

Gessler has been a terrible disappointment for voting rights advocates. Before he was Secretary of State, he was an attorney in private practice. He represented Ralph Nader in Nader’s winning 2004 ballot access lawsuit. In a separate lawsuit, Gessler also represented Walt Brown, the Socialist Party presidential nominee in 2004, and won a ballot access case for Brown as well. The case Gessler won for Walt Brown concerned the deadline for qualifying as an independent or minor party nominee, which was on July 4 in 2004. After Gessler won the case, the legislature moved the deadline to the first week in June, which gives Colorado the nation’s second-earliest qualifying deadline in the nation for independent presidential candidates. Even though Gessler fully understands the harm done by a too-early deadline, he has failed to respond to messages suggesting that he ask the legislature to make that deadline later. Thanks to Nancy Hanks for the link.

The Amsterdam News of August 7 has Lenora Fulani’s warm and personal remembrance of Fred Newman. The Amsterdam News is a New York city publication. Thanks to Sarah Lyons for the link.