On September 10, the California legislature passed AB 30. It lets any citizen who is 17 years old complete a voter registration form and submit it. The county would process it, but it would not take effect until that individual is 18 years old. Under current law, 17-year-olds can only fill out a voter registration form if they will be age 18 by the next election.
As noted earlier, on September 9 a Washington state Superior Court ruled that initiative and referendum petitions need not bear the signatures of the circulator. Also, voters may sign such petitions even if they are not registered, and their signatures will be counted if they are registered by the time the Secretary of State’s office checks the signatures. The 30-page decision in this case, Washington Families Standing Together v Reed, is now available here. Thanks to Katie Blinn of the Secretary of State’s office for this link. The ruling was issued orally so the link is to the transcript of the judge’s oral decision.
The basis for the ruling that signers need not be registered when they sign the petition, as long as they are registered by the time the petitions are checked, is that the law does not require signers to date their signatures. Thus, practically speaking, the Secretary of State can’t know exactly when any particular individual signed the petition, so it is impossible to know if the signer was registered before signing, or shortly afterwards.
The Suffolk County, New York Libertarian Party candidates for county offices will be heard in state court on October 7, in their fight to show that the Suffolk County Board of Elections should not have removed them from the ballot. They are Steve Kosin for Sheriff, Christopher Garvey for District Attorney, and Audrey Capozzi for Treasurer. If they do not win the lawsuit, the voters will only have one candidate to vote for in November 2009 for each of those offices. Here is their amended complaint.
On September 14, Hart Intercivic Corporation filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, charging that the proposed merger of Diebold’s vote-counting machine business with ES&S (Election Systems & Software) would create a violation of the Clayton anti-trust Act. Here is the complaint. Thanks to Joseph Hall for this news. The case is Hart Intercivic v Diebold and ES&S, 1:09-cv-678.
The major parties have long issued certifications after each national presidential candidate to each state, for the purpose of informing each state’s elections officials which names to print on the November ballot for president and vice-president for that particular party. Here are the certifications sent to the South Dakota Secretary of State for both major parties from 2004. Here are the certifications from both major parties to South Dakota in 2008. They show that in both 2004 and 2008, the Republican certifications asserted that their nominees met the constitutional qualifications. By contrast, it happens that the Democratic certifications did not discuss whether their nominees met the constitutional qualifications.
The major parties (and minor parties as well) are free to word their certifications any way they wish. No government, federal or state, tells the national parties how to prepare their certifications, or what information they should contain. The information is only relevant because of the assertion made by J. B. Williams a few days ago that for some reason, the Democratic Party national convention officials in 2008 prepared a certification that did assert that the party’s national nominees meet the constitutional qualifications, but then apparently junked that version and went with another version that did not mention the constitutional qualifications.
