On May 31, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced that he has changed his registration from Democratic to independent. He is not running for re-election this year, nor is he running for anything else.
There are now four independents in the U.S. Senate, the most ever since the beginning of popular elections for U.S. Senators. Oddly, there are no independents in the U.S. House.
On May 30, the Ohio House passed HB 2, which moves the deadline for qualified parties to certify their presidential and vice-presidential nominees from 90 days before the election to 65 days before. It also passed HB 1, which bans foreigners from spending money to influence initiative campaigns.
The bill easing the deadline applies to all future elections, but it only applies in years when a qualified party asks for the later deadline in advance.
On May 28, the Senate had passed a bill making both the deadline change and the campaign finance change. That bill is HB 271. Because that bill is not identical to the bills passed by the House, no bill has yet passed the entire legislature.
On May 30, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla, an Obama appointee, struck down the New York law that makes it a crime for anyone to give food, drink, or tobacco to any voter standing in line at the polls on election day. The Brooklyn Branch of the NAACP v Kosinski, s.d., 1:21cv-7667.
Here is the opinion, which is based on the free speech part of the First Amendment. Testimony showed that people who want to give food or drinks to people in line mean to convey the message that voting is important and that the voters waiting patiently should be encouraged. The decision says that there have been elections in which voters waited as long as five hours in order to vote.
The decision also says that New York’s defense of the law is inherently contradictory. On the one hand the state argued that the law isn’t generally enforced, but on the other hand the state insisted the law is necessary. The case had been filed in 2021 and has a considerable amount of evidence. Thanks to DemocracyDocket for the link.
On May 29, the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. campaign filed a federal lawsuit against various aspects of the New York independent presidential petition law. Team Kennedy v Berger, s.d., 1:24cv-03897. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr., an Obama appointee.
Even though Kennedy submitted three times the number of signatures over the legal requirement, both Democratic and Republican Party New York officials have announced that they intend to challenge the petition.
On May 29, independent U.S. Senator Angus King announced that he is running for re-election, again as an independent. The Senate has three independents, all of them up for re-election this year. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is also running for re-election. Senator Kyrsten Sinema is not running for re-election.
