On August 30, Japan held an election for all 480 seats in the lower legislative body. The winning party, the Democratic Party of Japan, has won at least 270 seats and may have won 300, ousting the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Ironically, the winning party would have won even more seats, except that it didn’t run a full slate of candidates. See this story. Thanks to Rick Kissell for the link.
According to this story, the planned 3-candidate New Jersey gubernatorial debates are on shaky ground. The law requires candidates who receive public funding to participate, but Democratic nominee Jon Corzine, the incumbent, has not asked for public funding. Corzine has not said he won’t participate. However, the director of the state agency that sponsors the debates has asked that the first debate be postponed from October 1 to October 22. Republican nominee Christopher Christie, and the independent who has been invited into the debates, Chris Daggett, believe that the Governor is behind the request to postpone the debate, and they are opposed to postponement.
This year, the Washington state legislature passed a bill providing for domestic partners. Opponents of the idea then collected signatures on a referendum petition to ask the voters if they wish to reject the new law.
Already, the petition drive had brought about one lawsuit, over whether the names of people who signed the petition should be made known to the public, or kept secret. Proponents of the petition filed that case, which has a hearing in federal court next week.
On August 27, another lawsuit was filed by opponents of the petition, alleging that the Secretary of State is approving signatures on the petition that should be rejected. The petition-checking process is still proceeding, and the results (to be announced next week) are expected to be very close. See this story.
The bill moving through Congress to fund the military has an amendment that requires states to postally mail ballots to overseas absentee voters no later than 45 days before the general election. This New York Times story says that New York state officials believe that if the bill passes, the state will be forced to move its primary (for office other than president) from September, to an earlier month. About a dozen other states also have September primaries, and what is true for New York will probably be true for them as well.
The Brennan Center for Justice, which was once a friend of voting rights for minor party and independent voters, did most of the legal work of defending the discriminatory Connecticut public funding law in court. On August 28, the Brennan Center issued an angry press release about yesterday’s decision. It says, “This decision by a single judge completely disregards binding constitutional precedent regarding public financing programs – which have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court and other federal courts.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has only had one case involving public funding, Buckley v Valeo. The decision, released in 1976, upheld federal law that gives political parties general election funding for the presidential campaigns if that party polled at least 5% of the vote in the last presidential election. It also gives general election public funding to new parties that surpass 5%, but immediately after the election is over (so, parties that expect to poll 5% for President are usually able to borrow money on hopes of meeting the goal; John Anderson used this strategy in 1980).
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the differential in treatment by noting that the general election public funding was only upholding the status quo, because no minor party or independent presidential candidate had won the presidency since before the Civil War, and only once since the Civil War had such a candidate even placed second.
By contrast, the Connecticut law affects candidates for state office. Over 180 non-Republican, non-Democratic nominees for state office (in the 50 states) have been elected in the last 32 years. Connecticut elected an independent Governor in 1990 and an independent U.S. Senator in 2006. Green Party and Working Families Party nominees (who were not also major party nominees) have been elected recently to partisan city office in Connecticut. All of the New England states except Connecticut have minor party or independent state legislators.
The Brennan Center would apparently have people believe that Buckley v Valeo was intended to make it possible for governments to discriminate against minor party and independent candidates, even in elections in which those candidates sometimes do win. The press release also ignores the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cook v Gralike that the Constitution forbids the government from discriminating for or against any candidates for Congress. The press release also ignores the fact that Arizona and Maine public funding programs do not discriminate, and that the bills for public funding of Congressional candidates, S752 and HR 1826, do not discriminate. Nor does the Brennan Center mention the Helsinki Accords, in which the United States pledged not to discriminate for or against any parties or candidates. If Justice William Brennan were alive today, he would be disappointed in the Brennan Center.
