On January 19, a state court in Tucson, Arizona will hear the case called City of Tucson v State of Arizona. The issue is whether the State Constitution protects a city’s right to decide for itself whether it wants partisan or non-partisan elections for its own offices. This year, the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring cities to use non-partisan elections, but Tucson (which uses partisan elections) says the law violates the Arizona Constitution.

On January 11, a U.S. District Court in Phoenix will hear the Green Party’s case against the state’s ban on out-of-state circulators for petitions to put a new party on the ballot. Another issue in that case is whether the February 2010 deadline for new party petitions can be enforced against the Green Party, since the legislature moved that deadline to an earlier date and made the change effective in 2010, after the Green Party’s petitioning effort had already started.

The Boston Globe of December 16 has this editorial, telling the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in next month’s special election that she is wrong to refuse to debate, unless all three ballot-qualified candidates are invited.

The person who wrote this editorial probably doesn’t know that in Minnesota in 1998, every gubernatorial debate included Jesse Ventura, and there were dozens of such debates, all year long, in the primary season as well as the general election season. The Boston Globe says the independent, Joseph L. Kennedy, is “little-known”. Obviously, if he were included in all the debates, that problem would be overcome.

The New York Daily News has this story about the Working Families Party of New York. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York is investigating whether the campaign finance practices of the Working Families Party in New York in the 2009 city elections were proper.