The September 23 issue of the Muncie, Indiana Star Press, has this editorial, seeming to give support to last week’s decision invalidating Indiana’s law requiring voters at the polls to show government photo-ID that has not expired.
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An Arizona administrative law judge has just concluded a 4-day hearing on whether Representative Doug Quelland should be removed from the legislature for alleging violating campaign finance laws. See this story. A decision is expected by mid-November.
In June 2008, some Ron Paul supporters won seats on the Alameda County, California, Republican Central Committee. Twentyfive days after the election, the County Chair of the Alameda Republican Party filed an election challenge, saying that some of the people elected had not been members of the Republican Party during the three months before filing for the office. The Superior Court had dismissed the lawsuit, saying that the challenge to the election results should have been filed no later than 5 days after the election.
On September 4, the State Court of Appeals said that the challenge had been timely filed, and sent the case back to the Superior Court to decide the merits of the case. The California Election Code says primary election results must be challenged within 5 days, but for actual elections, the deadline is 30 days. The Appeals Court said the election of County Central members is an “election”, not a “primary”. The case is Cummings v Stanley, A123743. In the Superior Court it is RG-08-400144.
In 2008, five Florida voters filed in the Green Party primary to run for the legislature. No Green Party leaders had ever been aware of them, and circumstantial evidence suggested that Republican Party activists had recruited them to run, for the purpose of giving the Republican nominees in those five districts an advantage. Although all five races had been expected to be close, Democrats won all five despite the presence of the Green Party nominees.
The state chair of the Green Party filed a lawsuit last year, seeking to find out whether the candidates’ campaign finance reports might have been untruthful, because each said he or she paid the filing fee of approximately $2,000 without help from any outside source, which seems dubious. There was to have been a deposition of one of the candidates on September 23, but it was cancelled, for the second time, because no one knows where that one candidate is now, so she couldn’t be served. The plaintiffs will now seek to depose the other four candidates, if they can be found. The case is called King v Roman, Pasco Co., 6th dist., 51-2008-ca-8091.
In 2006 the voters of Pierce County, Washington (which includes Tacoma) passed a measure to use Instant Runoff Voting for county offices. This year, the Pierce County Council put a repeal of IRV on the November 3, 2009 ballot. The repeal is known as Amendment Number 3. The existing charter says, “The elections of all County officials, except judges and Prosecuting Attorney, shall be conducted using IRV.” The proposed repeal would replace that with “The elections of all County officials, including judges and Prosecuting Attorney, shall be conducted according to the state election method.”
Kelly Haughton, a leader of the pro-IRV forces in Pierce County, has observed that the proposal does not say that elections for County office should use the “top-two” system, which Washington state currently uses. This is probably because no one in Washington can be certain what the future “state election method” will be, given that “top two” is still under attack in a U.S. District Court in Washington. The opponents of IRV were apparently being careful when they wrote their ballot question, so that if it passes, and if the state’s election system changes again in the future, the change won’t invalidate the County measure.