On August 8, an Arizona Superior Court held a two-hour hearing over whether the recall petition against State Senate President Russell Pearce is valid. See this story. Senator Pearce argues that all of the signatures are invalid, because of various aspects of the petition’s wording.
Ballot Access News
July 1, 2011 – Volume 27, Number 2
| This issue was originally printed on cream paper. |
Table of Contents
Michael Lind has this essay at Salon. He suggests that proportional representation would be good for the United States, but then concludes that a nation that still hasn’t switched wholly to the metric system is unlikely to switch to proportional representation either.
The essay also says that the U.S. needs more than new ideas; it needs a whole new social movement, embodying ideas that have not yet crystallized.
On August 9, the Ohio Libertarian Party filed a new ballot access lawsuit in U.S. District Court, called Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, southern district, 2:11-722. Here is the complaint. The party charges that the new ballot access law, signed into law last month, is still unconstitutional. The complaint also asserts that it violates due process for the Secretary of State to have removed the party from the ballot in the partisan 2011 elections, and to have given the party a shortened window for qualifying in 2012.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley, a Clinton appointee.
Kansas has registration by party, but the Kansas voter registration form does not have a blank line in which a voter can write in a party. The form mentions the qualified parties, so a voter in Kansas is forced to either register as an independent, or as a member of a qualified party. On August 8, the Constitution Party, which is not ballot-qualified in Kansas, filed this brief in the 10th circuit, in its lawsuit to force the state to let voters register into unqualified parties that are active in the state. The case is Constitution Party of Kansas v Kobach, 11-3152.
The 10th circuit already ruled in 1984 in Baer v Meyer, a Colorado case, that the Constitution requires states to let voters register into active unqualified parties. Kansas is in the 10th circuit. But the U.S. District Court still ruled in this case in favor of the state, saying that if there were a write-in space, perhaps the voter would have illegible handwriting and elections officials might not be able to read the party name. This ignores the obvious points that, first, the form asks voters to print; second, if this were a problem for the party name, theoretically it would be an even bigger problem for reading the voter’s name and address.
