This article, pubished August 25, shows how a candidate for City Council in Ocala, Florida, was told by city election officials that his petition would not be valid because he collected the signatures before opening a campaign bank account. So, he didn’t file the signatures. Later he learned that the petition would have been valid if he had only turned it in.
On August 24, a lower state court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, invalidated an initiative petition that would have converted Tulsa city elections from partisan elections to non-partisan elections. See this story. The judge ruled that the required number of signatures is closer to 19,000 than 6,000. The confusion arises from determining which election turnout figure to use to determine the number of signatures needed.
The Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Corrections and Courts will hear AB 353 on August 27, according to this story. The bill would let people register to vote if they had been convicted of a felony but they are now out of prison but still on probation. The bill affects 41,429 Wisconsin adult citizens.
According to this story, published August 22, Tennessee state election officials will consider whether to start listing Republican nominees first on the general election ballots.
Ever since Tennessee has used government-printed ballots, starting in 1889, Democratic nominees have been listed first, followed by Republican nominees, followed by the nominees of other qualified parties, followed by independents. Independents have been listed in alphabetical order. Oddly, Tennessee has no law on the subject of the order of party nominees on the ballot. Some counties use office-group ballot format and some use party column format, but the traditional “Democrats first” applies to both types of county.
Some courts have held that states must use neutral principles when they determine the order of candidates on ballots. The most recent decision was from the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which ruled in 2006 that the Constitution requires that party columns be rotated. That case was called Akins v Secretary of State.
On March 16, 2009, the faction of the American Independent Party that supported Chuck Baldwin for president in 2008 filed a lawsuit in Solano County, California, asking the state court to rule its state party officers are the proper party officers. That lawsuit has not moved forward because the state chair of the party’s other faction, Markham Robinson, has been evading service ever since. However, California law permits someone to be served by newspaper notice, as well as personally, and that alternate procedure is being used. The newspaper notice ran for the first time on August 15, so Robinson will be officially served on September 12.
