Great Britain is expected to vote on May 5, 2011, on whether to use Single Transferable Voting for House of Commons elections. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
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On the evening of June 30, the Delaware Senate passed HB 425, the bill that says the new higher requirements for minor parties to be on the ballot should not take effect until 2011. Assuming the Governor signs the bill, this keeps the Constitution and Green Parties on the ballot this year.
The old law requires parties to have registration membership of at least one-twentieth of 1%. The new law requires them to have registration of one-tenth of 1%. The new requirement was passed early this year, but then the parties that are affected complained that they were not given enough time to comply with the new requirements.
On July 1, a Superior Court Judge in Riverside County, California, ordered Riverside County elections officials not to certify the votes cast in the June 8 primary, until the next court hearing. The lawsuit contends that approximately 12,000 mail ballots should be counted. The lawsuit appears to be one in which both the plaintiff and the defendant are actually on the same side, with each hoping for a court order that the ballots should be counted. See this story.
The ballots have not been counted yet because state election law says mail ballots can’t be counted unless they are in the hands of elections officials by 8 p.m. on election day. The Riverside County ballots would have been delivered on time, except that the Riverside County elections department send an employee to the wrong post office to collect the ballots. Unbeknownst to the elections officials, the post office had them in a different post office than the post office the elections officials visited.
Washington state on November 2, 2010, will have one statewide race on the ballot, U.S. Senate. This SurveyUSA poll shows that in the August “top-two” primary, the first and second finishers will be incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Patty Murray, and Republican Dino Rossi.
Fifteen candidates are on the August top-two primary. SurveyUSA pollsters read the entire list to poll respondents. The results: Murray 37%, Rossi 33%, all thirteen other candidates 11% (combined), and 19% undecided.
The four candidates who have labels other than “I prefer the Democratic Party” or “I prefer the Republican Party” do poorly. Mercer and Leonard, the two candidates with “no party preference” each have 0%. Baker, whose ballot label is “I prefer the Reform Party” is also at 0%. Said, whose label is “I prefer the Centrist Party” is at 1%.
These results confirm the predictions of top-two opponents, that the top-two system, for statewide office, inevitably produces a general election ballot with one Democrat, one Republican, and no one else. Furthermore, Washington state this year won’t be producing a Voters Pamphlet for the August primary. Washington state will produce a Voters Pamphlet for the November election, containing candidate statements. So non-mainstream candidates will not only be shut out of the general election campaign, their campaigns between now and the August primary will be handicapped by the absence of a Voters Pamphlet.
On June 30, U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan, a Bush Jr. appointee, ruled that Nevada initiative petitions must not say that the circulator swears that all signers are registered voters. The case is Angle v Miller, 2:09-cv-1969. See this story. The judge declined to invalidate the distribution requirement, which requires signatures of 10% of the last vote cast in all three of the state’s U.S. House districts. Thanks to Glenn Brown for the link.