The daily newspaper of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, has this article about the lawsuit to overturn the Colorado law that says no independent (except for president) can be on the November ballot, if that independent was a member of a qualified party at any time later than 17 months before the general election.
On January 19, the city council of San Leandro, California, voted 5-2 to use Instant Runoff Voting for the city’s own elections in 2010. San Leandro is in Alameda County. Since Oakland and Berkeley will be using it this year for their city elections, San Leandro was persuaded to try it as well. Thanks to Blair Bobier for this news.
At the point at which 94% of the vote had been counted in the special U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, the vote was: 1,148,400 for the Republican nominee; 1,029,600 for the Democratic nominee; 22,100 for the Libertarian who was running as an independent candidate. The percentages at that point were: Republican 52.2%; Democratic 46.8%; Libertarian independent 1.0%.
Here is a newspaper interview with the Libertarian candidate, Joseph Kennedy, conducted after the results were known.
On January 19, the Arizona State Senate Judiciary Committee passed SCR 1009, which would provide that the state’s public funding program for candidates for state office would no longer be funded. See this story.
On January 19, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a brief, unsigned opinion, dismissing the Green Party’s challenge to the oath that candidates must sign before they run in a major party primary. The mandatory oath is one reason the Green Party’s candidate for the State House in 2008, Eugene Platt, could not be on the November 2008 ballot. Platt had first obtained the Green Party nomination. Then he had run in the Democratic Party primary. To get on the ballot in the Democratic Party primary, he had to sign an ambiguously-worded oath that the party says barred him from running in November as the Green Party nominee.
The Supreme Court says its own opinion has no precedential value and will not be published. It avoided the issue that the Green Party had argued in that court, namely, that loyalty oaths are unconstitutional for candidates. The Supreme Court said since the party had not made that argument in the lower state court, it can’t raise it now.
Two federal cases on this issue in South Carolina are still pending. One challenges the election law that says that someone who tries to get the nomination of two parties, and fails to get either one, cannot then be the nominee of the other party. The other case asks whether South Carolina should have obtained U.S. Justice Department approval, under the Voting Rights Act, before it changed its rules on whether candidates seeking a party nomination must file a declaration of candidacy for each separate party. At one point only one declaration of candidacy was good enough, but later the state changed the rule and said a separate declaration of candidacy is needed for each party. But the state didn’t clear this change with the Voting Rights Section of the U.S. Justice Department. Thanks to Scott West for this news.
