On Monday, August 24, a Tulsa County District Court will hear Eagleton v City of Tulsa, cj2009-5920. The issue is whether an initiative petition is valid. The initiative would ask the voters if they wish to convert Tulsa city elections from partisan elections, to non-partisan elections.

The challenge to the validity of the petition consists of two issues: (1) whether the petition contained a clause warning voters against signing false signatures; (2) whether the petition needs 3,427 valid signatures, or 19,336 valid signatures. The petition has 6,675 valid signatures. The uncertainty over the required number depends on whether the “last preceding general election” is the April 2006 election, or the April 2008 election. The April 2008 election had a very low turnout. It was for city council districts in part of the city, plus it had citywide ballot questions. The challenger says the April 2008 election shouldn’t count, and the city should look back to the April 2006 election, when citywide offices (not just district offices) were on the ballot.

On August 20, a Commonwealth Court in Pennsylvania disqualified Wieslaw Niemoczynski from the November 3, 2009 ballot as an independent candidate for Monroe County Common Pleas Judge. However, the trial showed massive problems with the state’s list of registered voters, nicknamed SURE. The candidate may appeal. See this story.

The evidence showed that the candidate needed 250 signatures, submitted 331, but was determined to have only 197 valid. 52 signatures were disqualified because of address irregularities. For example, many signatures were collected in a housing development in which residents had been told to use their lot number as their street number, yet their signatures were disqualified because they followed those instructions, instead of using their actual street number (the street numbers are not physically visible on the houses or their curbs).

On August 20, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour ruled that the lawsuit Washington State Republican Party v State will go to trial. This is the lawsuit that was filed in 2005 against the “top-two” system passed by the Washington voters in 2004. See this story. Here is the 29-page decision.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in March 2008 that Washington state’s “top-two”, on its face, does not violate freedom of association for political parties, the Court had left open the possibility that “top-two” violates freedom of association for political parties, in practice.

Supporters of “top-two” have for the last 18 months been saying that the case against “top-two” is all over, but it is not over.

Judge Coughenour rejected the Libertarian Party’s ballot access and trademark arguments. He said that in Williams v Rhodes (the U.S. Supreme Court opinion that invalidated Ohio’s 15% of the last gubernatorial vote petition), the American Independent Party had no opportunity to reach the statewide electorate by any type of ballot. That is not true. The American Independent Party’s only candidate in 1968 in Ohio was George Wallace, running for president. The party made it clear that it had no interest in any candidate except George Wallace for President. Yet Wallace was free to have run for president in the Democratic presidential primary, and any Ohio voter was free to choose to vote in that primary.

Judge Coughenour also said “the Washington general election becomes, for all intents and purposes, a runoff election.” This may be true for state and local elections, but it is not true for Congressional elections. A federal law dictates that Congressional elections must be in early November, with run-offs permitted in late November, or December. That is why the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Foster v Love that Louisiana could not hold its first round of Congressional elections in September, with a run-off in November.