The print edition of the New York Times for March 24 has this Thomas L. Friedman column, recommending that states pass Instant Runoff Voting, and also recommending that states create nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional and legislative district boundaries.

Friedman cites the work of Larry Diamond, author of “The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World”, and coordinator of the democracy program of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.” Diamond is a Stanford senior fellow.

Friedman says that if states used IRV, centrist moderates would have a better chance of being elected as independent or minor party candidates. Thanks to Carter Momberger for the link.

The March 23 issue of the Hartford Courant has this article about the legislature’s plans for changing the state’s public funding law. Although the Joint Government Administration and Elections Committee passed bills six days ago that remove the discriminatory parts of the law, those bills haven’t yet received a vote on the floor of either house. Thanks to Eric Brown’s Political Activity Law for the link.

Pia Varna, the only Republican running for the U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania’s First district, has been removed from the Republican primary ballot because some of her signatures were collected by people who don’t live in the First district. See this story. One must read to the very end of the story to learn the basis for the challenge to her petition. UPDATE: the candidate expects to file a lawsuit soon in federal court, challenging the residency requirement for circulators of primary petitions.

However, in 2002, a federal court struck down Pennsylvania’s residency requirement for petition circulators for candidates. That decision, Morrill v Weaver, 224 F.Supp. 2d 882, says, “We believe that precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court and federal Circuit Courts clearly compel us to find that the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution prohibit those portions of sec. 2911(d) which require affiants to be residents of the particular electoral districts in which candidates are running. We declare all such provisions to be unconstitutional and void.”

Pennsylvania has seven ballot access restrictions that have been held unconstitutional, but which the legislature has never amended. The residency requirement for circulators is one such law.