The Republican Party National Committee meets later this week to vote on a proposal to change rules and dates for presidential primaries and caucuses. The proposal needs a two-thirds vote. See this story. Thanks to Rick Hasen’s ElectionLawBlog for the link.
The Constitution Party of Illinois submitted approximately 34,000 signatures at the end of June for its statewide slate of candidates. The petition was challenged. The process by which State Board of Elections officials check each individual signature, over the watchful eyes of proponents and opponents of that petition, has been finished. The result seems to be that the petition has 25,017 valid signatures. Because 25,000 are required, this is good news for the Constitution Party. However, there is still the possibility that the objectors will take further legal action to overturn the results. Thanks to Gary Odom for this news.
A majority of states depend on filing fees, instead of petitions, for candidates to get themselves on primary ballots. However, Illinois and New York have always depended on petitions for ballot access in primaries.
Recently, influential persons in those two states have begun to think about changing the ballot access laws to allow filing fees instead of petitions. In Illinois, a state legislator has tentatively agreed to introduce such a bill next year. Also, in New York, the New York City Bar Association recently endorsed the idea. Thanks to Harry Kresky for the New York news, and Christina Tobin for the Illinois news.
The New York recommendation suggests $2,500 for citywide office, and lesser amounts for smaller office. See the report here. One advantage to a filing fee alternative is that the government is relieved of the burden of verifying signatures, and the burden on the courts when petition challenges are filed. Plus, the government gets some revenue. And the candidate generally saves money, because petitioning is expensive.
Newsweek recently reported that the national Democratic Party’s bylaws committees, back on July 10, rejected one of the recommendations of the Democratic Change Committee. The Democratic Change Committee had been appointed to recommend changes in the party’s presidential nominee selection process. The Democratic Change Committee had voted to eliminate superdelegates, but the Bylaws Committee of the National Committee had vetoed that idea. See the story here.
As the Newsweek story says, the Bylaws Committee action was made without publicity, and until the magazine was working on the story, some of the members of the Democratic Change Committee hadn’t even known this news.
One of the two Las Vegas daily newspapers, the Review-Journal, said in an editorial on June 1 that the newspaper would not tolerate any blogs that reprint a few sentences of a Review-Journal news story and then link to that story. A few weeks later, it sued at least 80 blogs for copyright infringement. The link to the story itself is not a problem, but the newspaper didn’t like any part of its story being reprinted. Technically the plaintiff was not the Review-Journal itself, but a corporation called Righthaven LLC.
One of the unlucky blogs was Independent Political Report, which was sued for $75,000 on July 8 in federal court in Las Vegas. IPR had printed a few lines of the Review-Journal story and then linked to the newspaper’s full story. Reportedly the suit was settled by IPR’s paying $4,000. That settlement penalty, in BAN’s opinion, is a grossly disproportionate punishment for a very common practice, and a very unjust outcome. It is possible that IPR itself is muzzled from mentioning this outcome because of the terms of the settlement. IPR did not reveal this news to BAN and has not mentioned the incident.
