On January 12, the city manager of Berkeley, California, sent a letter to the city manager of San Leandro, California, indicating that Berkeley will use Instant Runoff Voting for its own city elections this year. There will be no June primary. Instead, the only city election will be in November 2010. The letter was sent to San Leandro because San Leandro is pondering whether to also use IRV this year.

Berkeley and San Leandro are both charter cities, so they are free to decide this matter for their own elections. Cities in California that are not charter cities do not have that freedom. The voters of Berkeley voted in 2006 to use IRV whenever the vote-counting equipment was ready, and a few weeks ago the Secretary of State certified the vote-counting machines used in Alameda County for that purpose. Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro are all in Alameda County.

In 2008, the Tennessee legislature passed a law, requiring that all vote-counting machines must have a paper trail, starting in 2010. Currently, 93 of the 95 counties use electronic vote-counting machines that do not provide a paper trail.

According to this story, the Tennessee Senate will vote on January 12 on a bill to repeal the 2008 requirement. The bill number is unknown, but it is apparently sponsored by State Senator Ron Ramsey. Because Senator Ramsey is also Senate Speaker, he is referred to in the article as Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor. Tennessee doesn’t have an elected Lieutenant Governor, and its Constitution says that if the governor dies or resigns, the Senate Speaker becomes Governor. Senator Ramsey is a Republican from eastern Tennessee. UPDATE: the Senate did pass the bill on January 12. Now it goes to the House. See this updated story. FURTHER UPDATE: the bill is now through the legislature (the House had passed the bill late in 2009, and Tennessee has two-year legislative sessions).

The hearing in U.S. District Court in the Arizona Green Party case took about 40 minutes. The state defended its law, barring out-of-state circulators from working on a petition to get a party on the ballot, by saying there is no enforcement mechanism to stop out-of-state circulators from working on such a petition. That is a rather half-hearted defense, especially because the petition form is a state form and it says that the circulator is an Arizona resident.

The state defended the February petition deadline by saying that the state doesn’t use random sampling to check petitions for new parties, so it needs extra time. Arizona does use a 5% random sampling procedure to check initiative petitions, and there seems no rational reason why Arizona can’t also use random sampling to review petitions for a new party. A decision is likely by the end of this week.