On May 5, a Superior Court Judge in Connecticut ruled that Susan Bysiewicz does meet the statutory requirement for candidates for Attorney General. The statute requires candidates for Attorney General to have actively practiced law during the last ten years. Bysiewicz is the current Secretary of State, but she is not running for re-election. Instead she is running for Attorney General. She is an attorney. The decision is 90 pages and is here. Thanks to John Anthony La Pietra for this news.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s web page has this link to preliminary, unofficial primary election returns. Ohio held primaries for the Constitution, Green, Libertarian and Socialist Parties, as well as the Democratic and Republican Parties, on May 4.

The Secretary of State’s election returns do not say how many voters chose the primary ballot of any particular party. But from the returns for the statewide candidates, one can know that at least this number of voters chose a minor party ballot: Libertarian 4,255; Constitution 1,737; Green 882; Socialist 369. It is true that the Libertarian Party candidate for Attorney General is listed as having received 6,146 votes, but this is almost certainly a mistake in the preliminary returns, because all the other statewide Libertarians received between 4,120 and 4,255 votes (each was unopposed), and it is wildly unlikely that approximately 2,000 voters would have chosen a Libertarian Party primary ballot and then left all the statewide offices blank except for Attorney General.

On May 5, the entire Eighth Circuit reversed an earlier decision of a 3-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit, and ruled that Martin, South Dakota, need not use cumulative voting for its city council elections. Here is the decision, which is Cottier v City of Martin, 07-1628.

Cumulative voting systems typically give voters three votes, in an election at which three candidates are to be elected. A voter is free to distribute his or her votes in any way. In other words, a voter can give one vote to each of three candidates; or a voter can give 1.5 votes to each of two candidates, or a voter can give all 3 votes to one candidate. The case arose because Native Americans in Martin have not been able to win seats on the city council under the city’s at-large system. Native Americans had sued, charging that the city’s at-large system violates the federal Voting Rights Act. They had won the case, but the city had asked the full circuit to overturn the decision, and now the city has won by a vote of 7-4. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.