On November 16, attorneys for the state of South Carolina filed this brief in the lawsuit South Carolina Green Party v South Carolina State Election Commission, pending in the 4th circuit.

The Green Party nominated Eugene Platt for state legislature on May 3, 2008, at a convention. The next month, Platt was defeated for the Democratic Party nomination for the same seat. South Carolina permits fusion, so Platt had been hoping to be the nominee of both parties in November. Because he lost the Democratic nomination in June, the Green Party nomination was considered void by the state, and Platt was omitted from the November ballot entirely. The state’s brief mostly ignores Platt’s strongest precedent, called California Democratic Party v Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court 2000 decision that said it is unconstitutional for a state to force a party to let outsiders help determine its nominee. Platt argues that since the Democratic Party was permitted to cancel out his Green Party nomination, the South Carolina system (as appled to instances when a minor party nominates first, before a major party nominating event) violates the principles set forth in California Democratic Party v Jones.

The state argues that Platt knew he was jeopardizing his Green Party nomination by running in the Democratic primary, and if he wanted to guarantee his Green Party nomination he should have avoided seeking the Democratic nomination. One wonders, what is the purpose of South Carolina’s fusion law, if not to encourage (rather than discourage) candidates from trying to use it.

The state’s brief also has a factual error on page 23. It says the U.S. Taxpayers Party nominated Pat Buchanan for president in 1996. This is not true. The U.S. Taxpayers Party only held one presidential convention in 1996, in San Diego, in August 1996, and it nominated Howard Phillips for President.

The Chicago Tribune has this article in its November 17 edition, about the Illinois system for determining if candidate petitions are valid or not. New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, are the only three states in the country in which tradition and habits say it is legitimate and normal for candidates to challenge the primary ballot access petitions of their rivals, so as to eliminate those rivals from primary ballots. Most states don’t even use petitions for candidate ballot access to partisan primaries. And in many of the states that do use petitions to control access to the primary ballot, elections officials check those petitions in a fair, apolitical, competent manner, and challenges aren’t part of the system.

And even in the handful of other states that do use petitions for primary ballot access, and technically depend on the challenge system, the norm is that such petitions never get challenged. One example of such a state is Wisconsin.

Newspapers in New York frequently criticize the challenge system in that state, but it is somewhat rare for Illinois newspapers to make such criticisms, so this article is welcome. The article points out that petition challenges in Illinois primaries are becoming more and more common, perhaps because access to the voter registration rolls is easier than it has been, partly because of the internet.

On November 13, an Alaska Superior Court Judge ruled that five write-in votes should be counted, in the November 3, 2009 election for Haines Borough Assembly. As a result, write-in candidate Daymond Hoffman won the election. See this story.

The five write-in ballots that were disputed said either “Hoffman” or “D. Hoffman.” Elections officials had not counted them, on the basis that they should have said “Daymond Hoffman.” However, for over a century, there has been a general consensus in courts all across the nation that when counting write-ins, the voter’s intent controls.

California courts deviated from that general understanding in 2004 and 2005, when they ruled that write-ins should not be counted if the voter forgot to “X” the box next to the write-in line on ballots. As a result, Donna Frye, a write-in candidate for Mayor of San Diego in 2005, was deemed defeated, even though if such votes had been counted, she would have been elected.