On November 16, Joelle Riddle filed her federal lawsuit against the Colorado law that makes it impossible for her to run for re-election as an independent candidate in 2010. She is an incumbent La Plata County Commissioner, a partisan office. She was elected in 2006 as a Democrat, but earlier this year she switched her affiliation to “independent.” Colorado law says no one may be an independent who was registered into a qualified party during the entire year before filing as an independent. Here is her complaint. The case is called Riddle v Daley, no. 09-cv-2680.

Southern Political Report of November 16 has a story about divisions in the present-day Democratic Party over health care. The article starts by saying, “Most folks don’t know that Democrats won more votes than Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. But given that those popular votes were split between Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, Lincoln was able to take advantage of the division and win the Electoral College even though he had less than 40% of the popular vote.”

That second sentence is not true; Lincoln’s victory did not depend on the fact that the Democrats were split. Even if all the popular votes for both Douglas and Breckinridge had been cast for a single Democratic presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln still would have won a majority in the electoral college. Lincoln got a majority of the popular vote in all the states that he carried, except for California and Oregon, which only had 7 electoral votes between them. Back in 1860, a majority in the Electoral College was 152 electoral votes, and Lincoln won 180 electoral votes.

The Democrats in 1860 had been aware that their chances were injured by having two presidential candidates, and they had formed “fusion” slates of presidential elector candidates in some states to counter the effects of their division. There were fusion slates in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island (some of these fusion slates also includes some electors for the Constitutional Union Party candidate, the fourth strong candidate in the race). There was also a Constitutional Union-southern Democratic fusion slate in Texas. None of the fusion anti-Lincoln slates won any electors, except three in New Jersey, all of which went to Douglas. Here is a link to the Southern Political Report story.

On November 13, the U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd circuit, ruled in favor of the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Republican Party, and against a dissident member of the county party committee who had sued the party committee. The plaintiff, Millie Max, in a Republican primary in 2007, had campaigned door-to-door against Republicans who had been endorsed by the party committee, and in favor of other Republicans who did not have the party’s endorsement.

The chair of the party committee had asked Max if she knew who was doing such campaigning, and said he would trace the suspect’s identity by tracing the suspect’s license plate number. At that point Max “confessed” that she was the individual doing such door-to-door campaigning against the party’s endorsed candidates. The chair of the party committee then threatened to call a special meeting of the committee, at which he would denounce her and call on her to resign. However, the committee could not have forced her to resign, because she had been elected at a Republican primary to the party position for a fixed term.

The Court ruled that the party chair’s behavior is not state action, and quoted the U.S. Supreme Court decision New York State Board of Elections v Lopez Torres (2008), which said, “A political party has a First Amendment right to limit its membership as it wishes, and to choose a candidate-selection process that will in its view produce the nominee who best represents its political platform.” Here is the recent Pennsylvania decision.