Professor Michael Malbin, Executive Director of the Campaign Finance lnstitute, has renewed the Institute’s advocacy of freeing up parties’ ability to decide how to spend their funds . See here.
Current federal campaign law lets political parties spend as much money as they wish on uncoordinated spending on behalf of their own nominees. But the federal law limits how much money the parties can spend on their own nominees, if the parties and the nominees coordinate the spending.
Steve Rankin’s blog Free Citizen has this interesting description of the evidence submitted by the Idaho Republican Party, in the party’s lawsuit to obtain a semi-closed primary for itself. Currently, Idaho has open primaries, which means that any voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
Louisiana elects its state officers in the odd years before presidential elections. However, in the fall of 2010, Louisiana will hold a special election to fill the vacancy in the Lieutenant Governorship. The office is vacant because the recent past Lieutenant Governor, Mitch Landrieu, resigned this month to become Mayor of New Orleans.
Effective in 2008, Louisiana changed its congressional elections from a top-two system, to a semi-closed primary system. The 2010 election will be the first time that Louisiana has held a special election to fill a statewide state office that is simultaneous with a congressional election. It may be awkward for the state to hold an election that uses one type of system for U.S. Senate, and an entirely different system for Lieutenant Governor. Details on how the state will handle this are not available on Tuesday, February 16, because state offices are closed for Mardi Gras.
The 11th circuit will hold a hearing in Coffield v Handel on Thursday, March 4. The issue is the Georgia ballot access procedure for independent and minor party candidates for U.S. House. Georgia requires a petition signed by 5% of the number of registered voters. In practice, this requirement is so difficult, no one has been able to complete that petition, for U.S. House, since 1964. Back in 1964, the signatures were not due until October, and were not checked. Also no congressional district boundaries split any county, so it was easy for petitioners to know whether any potential signer was a resident of any particular congressional district.
The three judges will be William Barbour, James Edmondson, and Stanley Marcus. Judge Barbour is a visiting U.S. District Court Judge from Mississippi. He is a Reagan appointee and has never had a ballot access case involving minor parties or independent candidates (such cases don’t exist in Mississippi, because the ballot laws are so easy). He did have a case on residency requirements for initiative circulators. In Kean v Clark, 56 F Supp 2d 719 (1999), he upheld Mississippi’s requirement that initiative circulators live in the state, but he struck down a related law that said that requirement could be applied against an initiative campaign that had began working before the in-state requirement had been created.
Judge Edmondson, a Reagan appointee from Georgia, has never had a ballot access case involving the number of signatures. He was on a panel in 1997 in Natural Law Party v Massey, where the issue was whether Georgia had violated due process in 1996, by invalidating petitions on the grounds that many of the signatures had been notarized by a notary public who had herself circulated a few pages of the petition. The lower court had upheld the state. The 11th circuit panel on which Judge Edmondson sat had said the case is moot.
Judge Edmondson wrote the 2-1 decision in Chandler v Miller, upholding Georgia’s law requiring candidates for state and local office to take drug tests. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed the 11th circuit and struck down the law.
Judge Edmondson was on an 11th circuit panel in 1996 that upheld Florida’s July 15 petition deadline for minor party presidential petitions.
Judge Marcus is a Clinton appointee from Florida. In 1998 he wrote the decision in Socialist Workers Party v Leahy, 145 F 3d 1240, striking down a Florida law that required minor parties to post a bond. The lower court had upheld the requirement. Also, in Swanson v Bennett, an Alabama case challenging the number of signatures required for minor party and independent candidates other than presidential independents, at oral argument he seemed favorable to Swanson. He was skeptical that Alabama had any good reason for requiring 36,000 signatures for Swanson (an independent candidate for U.S. Senator) when Alabama only required 5,000 for independent candidates for president. But, in the end, he signed the decision upholding the law.
On Monday, February 15, U.S. Senator Evan Bayh surprised his home state of Indiana by announcing he will not run for re-election this year. The Indiana primaries are on May 4. Indiana requires petitions for primary candidates for a few offices, and requires 4,500 for U.S. Senate candidates. They are due at noon (in the various counties) on Tuesday, February 16.
Senator Bayh had collected his 4,500 signatures, but he won’t be submitting them to the state because of his sudden decision not to run for re-election. It is likely that no other Democrat will have had time to collect the signatures by the deadline, which will leave no Democrats on the U.S. Senate primary ballot. Indiana does not permit write-ins in primaries. If no one is on the primary ballot, the Democratic Party’s state central committee would choose a Senate nominee after the May primary.
There had been one other Democrat who had been circulating petitions, but most observers believe she won’t have 4,500 valid signatures by the deadline. She is Tamyra D’Ippolito. See this story about her. Thanks to Ross Levin for this news. Also thanks to Brad King for some of the details.
