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.

Ballot Access News was started in 1985, as a print publication. This site has links to the paper issues for most of the years that the newsletter has been in existence. Just now available are the 1991 issues, thanks to Michael Ravnitzky and Eric Garris. Go here and scroll down to 1991 to see the old paper issues in pdf format.

On December 25, Arizona newspapers ran stories on the Arizona Green Party’s ballot access lawsuit. For example, see this story.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court on November 18, 2009, and is called Arizona Green Party v Bennett. It challenges the prohibition on out-of-state circulators. It also challenges the February 2010 deadline for new party petitions. The newspaper story says there is no hearing date, but there is a hearing date. The hearing will be January 11, 2010.

The newspaper story also says the party is challenging a law that makes it illegal for out-of-staters to register voters in Arizona. That is not correct. The party has been circulating a petition to get itself back on the ballot, and it is challenging the ban on petition circulators, not people who want to register voters.

The Arizona law for party status is complex. The Green Party can either be on in 2010 if it has registration of two-thirds of 1% as of November 1, 2009, or if it submits a petition signed by 1.33% of the 2006 gubernatorial vote. The party is using the petition method, not the registration method. It has 16,000 signatures, and it estimates that without volunteer help from Greens in neighboring states, it won’t have 20,449 valid signatures by February 25, 2010. California Greens would like to help with the petition drive, but it is illegal for them to do so. The state already lost on this issue in 2008, but all the legislature did in response was to legalize out-of-state circulators for independent presidential petitions. It left the out-of-state ban in place for all other types of petitions.