On June 6, the Republican and Democratic Parties filed their opening briefs in Washington State Republican Party v State, 11-35125. This is the same lawsuit that was originally filed in 2005, against the Washington state top-two system. The major party briefs deal with freedom of association. The Libertarian Party’s brief is now due June 20, and it will focus on the ballot access arguments.

In the federal California case against two particular aspects of the California top-two system, the hearing set last week in U.S. District Court was canceled. Judges cancel oral arguments sometimes when they feel they already know everything they want to know about a case. That case is called Chamness v Bowen and is in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. It is very likely that Judge Otis Wright will uphold both the discriminatory policy on party labels, and the policy that permits write-in space on ballots but says those write-ins can never be counted. Judge Wright had earlier this year refused to issue an injunction against the labels policy.

Mark C. Miller, the Green Party nominee in 2010 in the Massachusetts State House race (Berkshire 3rd district) who received 45.02% of the total vote, will run for that same seat in a special election later this year. See this story. In 2010, Miller was in a two-person race with a Democrat. That Democrat has now been nominated for a high position in state government, so it is overwhelmingly likely that the seat will soon be empty and a special election will be held.

UPDATE: see this article about Miller’s upcoming run, which ran in the Berkshire Eagle on June 12.

New Jersey elects state officers in odd years. On June 7, the deadline for independent candidates to file in the 2011 New Jersey elections, Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford, a registered Democrat, filed to run as an independent candidate for State Senate, 2nd district. Langford is irked at the incumbent Democrat, Senator James Whelan, because Whelan supports the Governor’s plan for the state to set up an agency that would diminish Atlantic City’s ability to govern itself.

Whelan, who was Mayor of Atlantic City 1990-2001, is white; Langford is black. The 2nd district (at least with its old pre-2010 census boundaries) leans Democratic, although in 2009 that district elected two Republican Assemblymembers. The State Senate seat in the 2nd district had not been up in 2009.

It is very rare for prominent politicians in New Jersey to ever run outside the two major parties. In most of New Jersey’s counties, the independent and minor party candidates are squeezed into a party column on the far right-hand side of the ballot, headed “Nomination by Petition.” By contrast, all the Democratic nominees are in a column headed by “Democratic” in big letters; and all the Republican nominees are in a similar column headed “Republican.” No one other than Democratic or Republican nominees has been elected to state office in New Jersey since 1880, largely because of the unfavorable ballot format in most counties. Langford is on the ballot, but he has said it is possible he will withdraw later.