The December 26 Philadelphia Inquirer has this story about more ethical problems with the Pennsylvania court system. The story says that the state’s Judicial Conduct Board, which is supposed to investigate ethics problems with state court judges, does not do its job and is intent on keeping its actions secret from other government agencies that are also trying to help fight corruption in the state judiciary. Thanks to HowAppealing for the link.
On December 25, Arizona newspapers ran stories on the Arizona Green Party’s ballot access lawsuit. For example, see this story.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court on November 18, 2009, and is called Arizona Green Party v Bennett. It challenges the prohibition on out-of-state circulators. It also challenges the February 2010 deadline for new party petitions. The newspaper story says there is no hearing date, but there is a hearing date. The hearing will be January 11, 2010.
The newspaper story also says the party is challenging a law that makes it illegal for out-of-staters to register voters in Arizona. That is not correct. The party has been circulating a petition to get itself back on the ballot, and it is challenging the ban on petition circulators, not people who want to register voters.
The Arizona law for party status is complex. The Green Party can either be on in 2010 if it has registration of two-thirds of 1% as of November 1, 2009, or if it submits a petition signed by 1.33% of the 2006 gubernatorial vote. The party is using the petition method, not the registration method. It has 16,000 signatures, and it estimates that without volunteer help from Greens in neighboring states, it won’t have 20,449 valid signatures by February 25, 2010. California Greens would like to help with the petition drive, but it is illegal for them to do so. The state already lost on this issue in 2008, but all the legislature did in response was to legalize out-of-state circulators for independent presidential petitions. It left the out-of-state ban in place for all other types of petitions.
The December 25 New York Times has this article about Sonoma County, California Christmas tree decorations in county buildings. It mentions that the activist who is opposed to government office display of religious symbols is Irv Sutley, and it also mentions that Sutley is associated with the Peace and Freedom Party.
The December 25 issue of the Durango (Colorado) Herald has this story about Joelle Riddle’s lawsuit against a law that says no one may be an independent candidate if that person has been a member of a qualified party an entire year before filing. Riddle is a County Commissioner who wants to run for re-election as an independent, but the law bars her from getting on the 2010 ballot as an independent because she was a registered Democrat in June 2009.
The article fails to mention that Riddle could, in theory, create a new ballot-qualified party for the entire state of Colorado. That new party, which could perhaps be called the Joelle Riddle Party, is free to pass a bylaw saying that it is willing to nominate any eligible person, regardless of that person’s past partisan affiliation. However, it would take 10,000 signatures to create a new party, although people anywhere in the state could sign. Given the more permissive rules for parties, it seems irrational for Colorado to impose such severe time restrictions on independent candidates.
On December 15, the New York State Board of Elections said that the state will soon buy optical-scan vote-counting machines. Still to be decided is whether Election Systems & Softward (ES&S) of Omaha, or Dominion Voting Systems of Toronto, will get the contracts. See this TV news story, concerning the process in New York city.
Voters will electronically mark their paper ballots, which are then read by the vote-counting equipment. There is a paper trail. New York in 2008 was the only state still using mechanical voting machines, which were invented in 1892 and provide that voters pull levers to indicate which candidate is being voted for. There is no paper trail with mechanical voting machines.
