California holds a special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat, 10th district, on September 1. In the likely event that no one gets 50%, there will be a run-off on November 3 between the top vote-getter from each party, along with any independent candidates. The 10th district is in the eastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. UPDATE: the American Independent Party and the Green Party also have members for this race who qualified by paying the filing fee.

It is likely that the only non-major party member who will be on the ballot will be Mary McIlroy, of the Peace & Freedom Party. The deadline for submitting signatures is July 20. However, signatures in lieu of the filing fee were due July 6, only three days after the Governor proclaimed the special election. Normally, minor party members in California collect signatures in lieu of the filing fee, which for this election is $1,740. Because the period for collecting that type of petition was so short, no one was able to use the in-lieu method. McIlroy, alone among several minor party and independents who had been interested in running in this election, raised the filing fee.

On November 3, 1998, the voters of the District of Columbia passed Initiative 59 by a vote of 69%-31%. The title was “Legalization of Marijuana for Medical Treatment Initiative of 1998”. However, the Board of Elections refused to release the election returns for that initiative, because on October 21, 1998, Congress had passed the Barr Amendment to the D.C. Appropriations Act. The Barr Amendment said, “None of the funds contained in the Appropriations Act may be used to conduct any ballot initiative which seeks to legalize or otherwise reduce penalties” for marijuana.

On September 17, 1999, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Roberts ruled in Turner v D.C. Board of Elections that the U.S. Constitution requires the Board of Elections to count the votes and release the results. The decision says, “To cast a lawful vote only to be told that that vote will not be counted or released is to rob the vote of any communicative meaning whatsoever.”

However, the decision did not say that the federal Barr Amendment could be overridden by the voters of D.C., so for 10 years, the initiative has been on the D.C. law books, but can’t be implemented due to the Congressional override.

But on July 16, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the D.C. Appropriations Bill for 2010 without the Barr amendment. If the U.S. Senate concurs, and President Obama signs the bill, D.C. will finally be able to implement Initiative 59.

There are double ironies here. The more obvious one is that former Congressman Bob Barr, as a lobbyinst for the Marijuana Policy Project in recent years, has been working to delete the Barr Amendment. This has been noted in most stories about the recent U.S. House action; see here.

But another irony, unmentioned in the press, is that Barr is about to sue the D.C. Board of Elections to force the Board to count the write-in votes of voters who voted for Barr in November 2008. Barr was a properly certified write-in candidate in the District last year, yet D.C. refuses to say how many write-ins he received, even though the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in1974 that D.C. must permit and count such write-in votes for president. The Turner decision from 1999 will help Barr win that case.

According to this story in the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, the six city council members who are Democrats voted themselves the power to each distribute $50,000 of taxpayer money to organizations that the various individual Democrats wish. However, the three city councilmembers who are not Democrats do not merit the same treatment. The three citycouncilmembers who are not Democrats are Working Families Party members Luis Cotto and Larry Deutsch, and Republican Veronica Airey-Wilson.

The article suggests that the Democratic majority may or may not give their three non-Democratic colleagues the authority to spend $20,000 each.