On December 22, the Center for Competitive Politics filed this 40-page amicus curiae brief in the 2nd circuit, on the side of the Connecticut Green Party, in the pending case over Connecticut’s discriminatory public funding law.
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Thomas Simmons of Winchester, New Hampshire, says he is mulling over becoming the Libertarian Party’s candidate for Governor of New Hampshire in 2010. See here for his statement and information about him. Thanks to NolanChart blog for the link.
Minnesota will hold a special election to fill the vacant State Senate seat, 26th district, on January 26. The Independence Party nominee will be Roy Srp, Mayor of Waseca, a city of about 10,000 people. Five Republicans have also filed so far. There will probably be a Republican primary on January 12. Probably a Democrat will file soon. Filing closes on December 29.
The seat is vacant because the incumbent Republican resigned earlier this month to take a job as a full-time lobbyist, on behalf of racetracks who want to install slot machines. Last time this seat was up, in 2006, the vote was Republican 54.5%, Democratic 45.4%. Thanks to Gene Berkman for the news.
In 1996, the League of United Latin American Citizens had sued Boerne, Texas, to force the city to use Cumulative Voting to elect its 5-member city council. Hispanic residents of Boerne had never been able to elect one of their own to the city council under the at-large system. The lawsuit was successful, and starting in 1997, Boerne used Cumulative Voting. Cumulative Voting gives each voter multiple votes (sometimes two, sometimes three). Each voter is permitted to use all of his or her votes to help just one candidate, or, alternatively, the voter can spread the votes around to several candidates.
Cumulative voting appeared to end in Boerne earlier this month. The League, dissatisfied with the cumulative voting experience, had persuaded the city council to stop using that system, and instead to establish single-member districts. The federal judge who had jurisdiction of the 1996 case also approved the change. However, now a group that doesn’t like single-member districts is threatening to sue the city, because the city charter establishes at-large districts and the city charter can only be changed by the voters. See this story.
California State Senator Abel Maldonado has established an organization to campaign for the “top-two open primary” measure that will be on the ballot in June 8, 2010. It is “Reform for Change”. Here is its web page.
Brandon Gesicki is listed as the organization’s Executive Director, and also the contact for media inquiries.
Gesicki was Senator Maldonado’s campaign manager when the Senator was re-elected in 2008. He is also the Political Director of the Monterey County Republican Party, and a member of the Monterey County Republican Central Committee. He has also been an employee in Senator Maldonado’s legislative office.
The web page says, “The two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary election will then compete in the General Election. All voters will have the opportunity to vote for any candidate they choose, which is not an option in the current system.” This is the opposite of the truth. The measure says that write-in votes will never be counted in the general election for Congress and state office. The write-in ban in Senator Maldonado’s bill, SB 6, is in section 8606, and says, “A person whose name has been written on the ballot as a write-in candidate at the general election for a voter-nominated office shall not be counted.”
Under existing law, an independent voter is free to ask for a Republican or a Democratic primary ballot in any Congressional or state office primary. Also, if a Republican candidate files as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary, then registered Democrats can vote for that Republican candidate and their write-ins will be counted. For instance, Maldonado himself filed as a write-in in the 2008 Democratic primary, and he received 533 write-ins from registered Democrats. Another write-in candidate in the 2008 Democratic primary for the same State Senate seat, Dennis Morris, received 2,096 write-ins, overwhelmingly defeating Maldonado for the Democratic nomination. However, Morris didn’t receive the Democratic nomination either, because neither he nor Maldonado met the statutory requirement of polling a number of write-ins equal to 1% of the vote for that office in the last general election.