The U.S. Supreme Court is in its last month before its summer recess. Opinions are coming out on each Monday in June. On June 14 the Court released four opinions, but no opinion in the only pending election law case, Doe v Reed. This means that opinion will be released on either June 17, June 21, or June 28. The issue is whether Washington state should release the names and addresses of people who sign petitions.
On June 10, Dan Collins, Huffington Post editor for New York, predicted that Andrew Cuomo, who is certain to be this year’s Democratic nominee for Governor, will eventually relent and accept the gubernatorial nomination of the Working Families Party as well.
That news is at the very end of his article.
Kathleen Curry, Colorado’s only independent state legislator, has opened a campaign office and has also submitted a petition to be on the November ballot as an independent candidate, in the 61st House district.
Whether she is on the ballot as an independent, or must run as a write-in, she is campaigning. She won’t know whether she is on the ballot until a U.S. District Court judge rules in the lawsuit over Colorado’s law on how soon independent candidates must have left their party. Curry left the Democratic Party last year to become an independent. If the law that will be in effect next year were in effect now, she would be on as an independent. But the law in effect this year does not allow her to be on the ballot because she left the Democratic Party too late; she should have left by June 2009.
Her campaign headquarters is at 54542 US Highway 50, Gunnison. No one has been elected to a state legislature as a write-in candidate, anywhere in the United States, at a general election, since 2006, when Massachusetts write-in candidate Pam Richardson was elected in the Middlesex 6 House district.
Curry will have two general election opponents, Democrat Roger Wilson, and Republican Luke Korkowski.
This week, Port Chester, New York, will use cumulative voting for its village trustee elections. This will be the first time cumulative voting has been used in New York state. Port Chester is in Westchester County, just north of New York city. See this story.
Port Chester was sued in 2006 under the federal Voting Rights Act. It has a substantial Hispanic minority, but under the village’s at-large elections, no one from that community ever won. Cumulative voting gives each voter a clump of votes, perhaps three, perhaps four, sometimes even five. Each voter is then free to spread his or her votes around to different candidates, or to give them all to a single candidate, or something in between.
The June 11 issue of the Dallas Morning News has this interview with Kat Swift, director of the Texas Green Party. Swift did an excellent job. It’s especially valuable that she mentioned that before 1967, Texas did not require any petition whatsoever for a minor party to be on the ballot, and yet Texas never had more than six parties on a government-printed ballot.
