On September 21, U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates, a Bush Jr. appointee, upheld the parts of the federal Voting Rights Act that require certain states to pre-clear election law changes with the Voting Rights Section of the U.S. Justice Department. The case is Shelby County, Alabama v Holder, D.C., 1:10cv-651. Here is the decision.

The Alabama case is one of several constitutional challenges to this part of the Voting Rights Act. A few months ago, another U.S. District Court had in Washington, D.C., had also upheld this part of the act, in a case filed by some North Carolina voters. Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news and for the link to the decision, which is 151 pages long. UPDATE: a third case challenging the pre-clearance parts of the Voting Rights Act, State of Arizona v Holder, happens to be before Judge Bates, so that increases the odds that the Arizona challenge will also lose. See this story.

The California Secretary of State has placed this chart on her web page. It shows how many signatures Americans Elect submitted on its petition to be a party, by county. If a particular county has already checked signatures (using a random sample), the chart shows the results. So far, the validity is at 76.8%, which shows that the petition is very likely to succeed. The chart will be updated daily. Not all counties have reported the number of signatures submitted, so as of today, the chart cannot be used to know how many signatures were submitted in the entire state. Americans Elect says it submitted 1,630,000 signatures to meet a requirement of 1,030,040.

Fox network and Google, co-sponsors of the September 22 Republican presidential debate, have invited Gary Johnson into that debate, according to this Politico story. The Florida Republican Party opposed the invitation and will not print his name on the party’s straw poll ballot.