On April 6, the San Jose Mercury News endorsed California’s Proposition 14, the top-two election measure. The editorial is here.

The editorial says that Proposition 14 wouldn’t injure minor parties, but the only reason it gives for saying so is that in 1999, Audie Bock, a Green Party member, was elected to the legislature in a special election. However, Audie Bock only got 8% in the first round, placing third. Under Proposition 14, she could not have even run in the second round.

When she was elected in 1999 in the second round, she only won because the blanket primary rules permitted the top vote-getter from each party to advance to the second round.

The editorial also says the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a top-two system. The whole truth is that the U.S. Supreme Court only upheld it on freedom of association grounds on its face. The Court left open the possibility that the top-two system violates freedom of association as applied. The Court also said that it was not deciding whether the system violates its ballot access precedents, or whether it violates trademark law for parties that have trademarked their name. That is why the case against the Washington state top-two is facing a trial in October 2010. On March 9, 2010, the U.S. District Court in Washington emphatically rejected the state’s request that the ballot access and trademark parts of the case be eliminated from the case.

The San Jose Mercury News also endorsed Proposition 62 in 2004. Proposition 62 was another top-two open primary ballot measure, but it was defeated.

Doe v Reed, the case from Washington state over whether names and addresses of petition signers should be public, is being heard in the U.S. Supreme Court on April 28.

The American Bar Association maintains an excellent web page that makes it possible for anyone to read any or all briefs, in any case about to be argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone may read the Doe v Reed briefs at this link. Scroll down to April 28.

Fourteen amicus briefs have been filed in support of privacy, and nine have been filed in support of the state of Washington, which wishes to release the names and addresses to groups so that the information may be put on a web page. One amicus on each side was submitted late, and each may or may not be accepted by the Court.

Some of the groups arguing on the side of the state say that the names and addresses should be released because that makes it possible to detect fraud. In order to buttress their position that fraud exists, two briefs attack Ralph Nader’s 2004 petition efforts. The brief of the National Conference of State Legislatures, footnote 8, refers the reader to a New York Times story of October 14, 2004, titled “Court Strikes Nader from Pennsylvania Ballot.”

The brief of Ohio and 17 other states asserts that because Nader’s 2004 petition from Ohio was public information, the 2004 decision of the Secretary of State to put Nader on the ballot was reversed. This account is very misleading. It says that the people who challenged Nader’s petition found additional fraud that Ohio election officials had missed. Actually, the challengers did not find any fraudulent signatures; they merely showed that some of Nader’s petition circulators weren’t Ohio residents, so that all their work was then stricken (since then, the Ohio ban on out-of-state circulators has been invalidated by the 6th circuit).

Some of the briefs in favor of disclosure denigrate the secret ballot, and say that the reason all states made voting secret was to prevent fraud, not to protect privacy. However, a leading impetus for the secret ballot was to protect employees from the threat of losing their jobs if they voted for parties or candidates not favored by their employers.

Much of the material in the amici briefs on both sides is repetitious. Probably the most interesting brief on the side of the state is the brief of Susan Wagner, who explains that her initiative in Massachusetts to outlaw killing horses was the victim of a paid petitioning company that was circulating her petition and also a petition to ban same-sex marriage. Because the petition on horses was far more popular than the petition on marriage, the paid petitioning company that was circulating both petitions tricked many signers into signing the less popular measure, by the placement of the two petitions on clipboards. Susan Wagner filed this amicus jointly with the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.

Probably the most interesting amici brief on the side of privacy is the one filed by the Committee for Truth in Politics and other groups, which shows how the existence of the internet has drastically changed the ability for anyone to learn a great deal of information about any individual. Putting the names and addresses of petition signers into a searchable database on the net is something very new in politics. If it spreads, it will surely make it more difficult to persuade many people to sign any kind of petition. Many individuals try to keep their residence address private.

The ACLU did not file an amicus brief in this case. When a case is in the U.S. Supreme Court, the national ACLU office decides whether or not to file an amicus brief. When this case had been in the 9th circuit, the Washington State ACLU had filed a brief on the side of the state, but there is no ACLU brief in this case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.