The California Board of Common Cause met on October 24 and mulled over whether to make an endorsement either for or against the “top-two” ballot measure that will be on the California ballot in June 2010. But the group decided to postpone that decision until the spring of 2010, when the campaign for and against will be in full swing.
The Morristown, New Jersey Daily Record has this very long and complete story about the nine candidates for New Jersey Governor who have not been getting much publicity. The story, of course, features the Libertarian Party candidate and the Socialist Party candidate, and also the seven independent candidates other than Chris Daggett.
On October 21, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, a non-profit corporation, announced that it has completed work on freely available open source technology for vote-counting machines. “Open source” means that the software programs would be publicly available, so that any programmer could review it for accuracy and reliability. The corporations that produce vote-counting machines generally keep their computer program a trade secret, which makes it difficult for outside experts to know how reliable it is and how it might be compromised by skillful hackers. See this story from Wired magazine.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is holding a partisan election for Mayor on November 3, 2009. The incumbent Mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, is the nominee of both the Democratic and Republican Parties (he is a Democrat, and he won the Republican nomination at the May primary by write-in votes). He has two strong independent opponents, Franco Harris and Kevin Acklin. Harris is an independent by conviction. Acklin decided to run as an independent, instead of in the Republican primary, because he knows that the it would be virtually impossible for a Republican to be elected in a Pittsburgh city election. All three candidates are well-funded. See this newspaper story about the race, which focuses on the fact that all three candidates are between ages 29 and 32. Thanks to Darcy Richardson for this news.
The October 25 Los Angeles Times has this even-handed analysis of the issue of whether petition signatures should be private. The issue arose in Washington state, around the R-71 Referendum petition that forced a public vote on the bill passed this year by the legislature for civil unions. The Times article correctly mentions that California law already requires that petitions for ballot measures are private.
