The Bristol (Connecticut) Press has this interesting analysis of the impact of the Working Families Party on Connecticut’s 2010 election.
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On December 4, the Tennessee Republican Party executive committee decided to study whether to support closed primaries or not. The study will take two months. See this story.
On October 28, 2010, the Maine Supreme Court agreed with the lower court, that the election laws do not permit candidates to transmit their petition signatures electronically to the various town clerks. Alex Hammer collected enough valid signatures to be on the ballot as an independent candidate for Governor. But some of his signatures were not counted because he scanned them at high resolution and e-mailed them to the various town clerks.
Thus, Maine continues to require candidates and parties to physically take their signatures to the various town clerks, and then collect them after they have been checked by the town clerks, and transmit them to the Secretary of State. The decision is only three pages and is Hammer v Secretary of State, 2010 ME 109.
The Maine Supreme Court has been consistently hostile to ballot access recently. Every ballot access case that has reached it during the last five years has resulted in a decision keeping the candidate off the ballot.
As of December 1, all briefs have been filed in Constitution Party of Kansas v Biggs, U.S. District Court, 10-cv-4043. The Constitution Party is not ballot-qualified in Kansas, but it has members in Kansas, and they wish to register as members of the Constitution Party. The Kansas registration form does not permit this. It has a checkbox for each of the 4 qualified parties, and a checkbox for people who wish to register as independents. But it does not have a write-in line on the form for anyone to register into an unqualified party.
The brief for the Kansas Secretary of State implies that the Constitution Party is demanding that the names of all unqualified parties be printed on the form, but the Constitution Party’s reply brief makes it clear that the Constitution Party is only seeking a write-in line on the form, and that elections officials tally those registrations for unqualified parties that have been politically active in the state. The Constitution Party has placed its presidential candidate on the Kansas ballot in each of the last two presidential elections, even though it wasn’t ballot-qualified.
The four ballot-qualified parties in Kansas currently are Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, and Reform. The 10th circuit ruled back in 1984 that Colorado must permit members of unqualified parties to register as members of those parties, if the unqualified parties were politically active in Colorado. Kansas is also in the 10th circuit.
Kansas and Nebraska are the only states in the nation which have registration by party, and which do not print a write-in line under “political party” on the voter registration form, and which will never print the names of any unqualified parties on the form. Nebraska is in the 8th circuit, not the 10th circuit, and no one has sued Nebraska over this issue.
December 3 had been the expected date for Eureka County (Nevada) to hold a card drawing, to settle the tie vote for County Clerk. However, the incumbent County Clerk, Jackie Berg, filed a lawsuit earlier that day to stop the card drawing. The case is Berg v Wright, filed in Eureka County District Court.
Berg was elected as the nominee of the Independent American Party in 2006, and she ran for re-election this year as that party’s nominee. Thanks to Cody Quirk for this news. In this year’s election, the original count showed Berg defeating her only opponent, the Republican nominee, by 3 votes. After a recount, the vote was tied.