On November 10, the Ohio House Elections Committee passed HB 260 by a vote of 7-6. All Democrats voted for it and all Republicans voted against it. It will receive a vote in the House next week. The bill is hundreds of pages long. It includes provisions making it easier for previously unqualified parties to get on the ballot, and also makes it much easier for parties to remain ballot-qualified. The news media generally don’t even mention those parts of the bill. See this story.
Last month, the Green Party of Cook County, Illinois, recruited a well-known candidate to run for the party’s nomination for Cook County Board President, a partisan office elected by all the voters of Cook County. He is Tom Tresser, one of the founders of “No Games Chicago”, the leading organization in Chicago to oppose the idea that the 2016 Olympics should be held in that city. Another Green who had planned to run for that office dropped out voluntarily and endorsed Tresser.
When filing closed on November 2, Greens were surprised to see that a person previously unknown to them had also filed petitions to run in the Green Party primary for that office. He is Sean Burke, whose name was listed on the Cook County Young Democrats web site as the administrative contact for that page. Two Green Party leaders attempted to telephone Burke to learn more about him, but he did not return calls, and the Young Democrats web page has now been emptied of its content. So, Greens have challenged Burke’s petition. See this NBC News story. Tresser’s web page is here.
The U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, has set a briefing schedule in Barr v Galvin, 09-2426. The brief of Massachusetts state officials is due December 21, 2009. The Libertarian Party’s brief is due January 20, 2010. The issue is whether the Constitution requires Massachusetts to permit unqualified parties to use a stand-in presidential candidate on its ballot access petitions. The lower court had ruled in favor of the Libertarian Party. This is the first time any case on stand-ins on petitions has reached any U.S. Court of Appeals. In the past, states that lost on this issue in federal court (two cases in Florida and one in Virginia) didn’t appeal.
Constitutional election law cases involving minor parties or independent candidates are now pending in six of the twelve U.S. Courts of Appeals. Besides the Massachusetts case pending in the First Circuit mentioned above, they are:
2nd Circuit: the Connecticut case over public funding laws that make it easier for Democratic and Republican candidates to receive funding.
4th Circuit: the South Carolina case that prevents a party from having its nominee on the November ballot if, after the party nominated someone, that person tried and failed to get the nomination of a second party.
5th Circuit: cases in Louisiana and Mississippi over the administration of deadlines for getting presidential candidates on the ballot, and whether only state legislatures can determine such deadlines.
9th Circuit: the Hawaii case over whether a state can require more than six times as many signatures for a single independent candidate as for an entire new party.
11th Circuit: cases in Alabama and Georgia over the number of signatures needed for independent candidates for the U.S. House.
This article discusses a Canadian election law that makes it illegal to broadcast election returns during national elections until all the polls are closed in the westernmost part of Canada. With the advent of new methods of communication, the ban no longer works and is largely unenforced. Canada has six time zones, and ballots from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick are mostly counted while the polls are still open in British Columbia and Yukon.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed four bills last month that would have inhibited the initiative process in some way. A previous blog post of October 12 said that he had vetoed SB 34, to make it illegal to pay initiative circulators on a per-signature basis. However, that blog post failed to mention three other vetoed bills: AB 6 would have required organizations that hire circulators to register with the Secretary of State and to pay an unspecified fee. AB 436 would have raised the filing fee for anyone to file a proposed initiative with the Attorney General, from $200, to $2,000. And AB 1068 would have it made it illegal for companies that hire paid circulators to write into the contract a provision saying no circulator would be paid unless the initiative qualified for the ballot.
