The U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, will hear Unity08 v Federal Election Commission on October 15, 2009, at 9:30 a.m. The panel consists of Judges Douglas H. Ginsburg, Karen Henderson, and Stephen Williams. The issue is whether the FEC was correct when it told Unity ’08 in 2006 that no one could contribute more than $5,000.

Judges Ginsburg and Henderson were part of the panel that ruled that the U.S. Post Office could not ban petition circulators on post office sidewalks that are parallel to public streets, in 2005. That case was called Initiative & Referendum Institute v U.S. Postal Service. The panel remanded the case back to the U.S. District Court to decide the other half of the case, interior sidewalks, and there is still no decision on that from the U.S. District Court.

Judge Henderson also was one of the judges in McConnell v FEC, and her May 2, 2003 concurring opinion in that case struck down limits on individual contributions to political party national committees (however, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld them later that year in a 5-4 decision).

The September 14 issue of the Patriot-News, the daily newspaper of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, explains why so few votes get cast in the county that contains Harrisburg, Dauphin County. See this article. Dauphin County uses Electec 1242B vote-counting machines. A voter who wishes to cast a write-in vote must first find the write-in button for the particular office. The voter pushes it, and then sees another button in another part of the machine that then begins flashing a red light. The voter pushes that button next, and that opens a small shutter, exposing a piece of paper within. The voter write-ins in that shutter, and must manually close the shutter.

In November 2006, Carl Romanelli, the write-in candidate for U.S. Senate for the Green Party, was only credited with 9 write-ins in Dauphin County, and the other statewide write-in candidates for the Green, Libertarian and Constitution Parties were not credited with any write-ins in Dauphin County.

The Patriot-News wrote this story because the incumbent Mayor of Harrisburg, Stephen Reed, is pondering whether to run a write-in campaign in November 2009 in order to stay in office. He lost the May 2009 Democratic primary.

The Ventura County Star of Ventura, California, has this interesting article on how Californians can go about applying to be on the elite commission that will draw state legislative district boundaries in 2011. Thanks to Rick Hasen’s ElectionLawBlog for the link. Four of the fourteen commissioners must be people who are not, and have not, been registered Republicans or registered Democrats.