Adam Kokesh has qualified for the New Mexico Republican primary ballot for the U.S. House race, district 3. He did so by collecting a number of additional signatures equal to 2% of the number of votes cast in the 2008 Republican primary for Governor in that district. He had already collected the same number of signatures before the preprimary convention.

If he had been recognized as having received 20% support at the party’s preprimary convention, he would not have needed that second batch of signatures. He got slightly more than 19.5% of the vote at that convention. New Mexico election code section 1-1-20, titled “Major Fractions” says, “In any place in the Election Code requiring counting or computation of numbers, any fraction or decimal greater than one-half of a whole number shall be counted as a whole number.” The Democratic Party of New Mexico this year interpreted that to mean that a candidate at the Democratic convention who got 19.69% of the delegate vote should be deemed to have received 20%, but the Republican Party does not follow the “Major Fractions” law.

Columbia, South Carolina is holding its regular election for city officers on April 6. One city council district, district 2, was not scheduled to have an election this year. However, the incumbent resigned abruptly on March 9. The city then set a special election for that district for April 6, giving candidates only 4 days to file.

On March 29, a federal lawsuit was filed to stop the special election. See this story. Plaintiffs charge that the election cannot be fair because potential candidates had such a narrow window in which to file. However, the basis for the federal lawsuit is that the city has changed its procedures for this special election and did not pre-clear those changes with the U.S. Justice Department. Absentee voting had already started for the regularly city election, and voters who already voted, who live in District 2, were given ballots that didn’t even include the special election.

The March 31 issue of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has this editorial, criticizing Ohio Secretary of State’s recent directive that changes the rules on which party’s primary ballot a voter may select in the May 2010 primary. As the editorial says, Ohio is an open primary state, meaning that the voter registration form does not ask voters to choose a party. But the Secretary of State’s directive says that if someone voted in one party’s primary in 2008, that same voter can’t choose a different party’s primary in 2008 unless that voter signs a declaration of loyalty to that party’s ideas.