This Wall Street Journal editorial, published December 26, supports the right of individuals to circulate petitions, no matter where they live. The editorial also contains a good amount of interesting facts about how state legislatures have behaved, relative to this issue.
Election Data Services has analyzed population estimates, and predicts that the census of 2010 will result in shifting eight electoral votes from the east and midwest, to the south and west. Texas is expected to gain 3 new US House seats. States gaining one new US House seat will be Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Utah. The eight states each losing one US House seat will be Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Here is the decision of the California Superior Court in King v Bowen, handed down tentatively on December 19. The case concerns the identity of the true officers of the American Independent Party of California. Judge Michael Kenny still finds procedural problems in the case, and says the issue of which party officers are valid can only be settled by the filing of a new lawsuit.
As noted in yesterday’s blog post, 13 states recently submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that Court to hear Arizona’s appeal in Brewer v Nader. The issues are whether out-of-staters can collect signatures in Arizona, and whether Arizona’s June 4 independent presidential petition deadline is unconstitutional.
If you live in one of the 13 states in which the Attorney General signed on to this amicus, you may wish to complaint to your state’s Attorney General. The 13 Attorneys General consist of these five Democrats: Mike McGrath of Montana (although he is is only in office for another week); Joseph Biden III of Delaware; Nancy Rogers of Ohio (although she is about to go out of office); Drew Edmondson of Oklahoma (who plans to run for Governor in 2010); and Bruce Salzburg of Wyoming.
The eight Republican Attorneys General are: Troy King of Alabama; Talis Colberg of Alaska; John Suthers of Colorado; Bill McCollum of Florida; Lawrence Wasden of Idaho; Mike Cox of Michigan; Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire; and Larry Long of South Dakota.
You might mention that if every state had a June 4 petition deadline, in the past, the Republican Party could not have run any candidates in 1854. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded on July 6, and in the fall congressional elections, it won a plurality in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Also, Theodore Roosevelt didn’t declare his candidacy as the Progressive Party nominee in 1912 until August; and Robert La Follette didn’t declare his independent progressive candidacy until July 4, 1924. So, if all states had had a deadline like Arizona, all these important political developments would have been strangled.
The New Mexico law defining which groups are qualified political parties is one of the muddiest such laws in the nation. However, the New Mexico Secretary of State seems very likely to agree that the Green Party is a qualified party, entitled to its own primary, based on the party’s 45% vote for Public Regulation Commission last month. The law requires a vote of 5% for “any” office, but the 5% is calculated with the presidential total vote as the denominator. That has caused some to believe that only the vote for president counts, although a reasonable person would interpret “any office” to mean just that, any partisan office.
The Secretary of State’s office says that it can’t be certain the Green Party is ballot-qualified until the new voter registration data comes out. The law requires that a major party meet not only the vote test, but it must also have one-third of 1% of the registration, as members. However, the Green Party is extremely likely to meet this test also, since in October 2008 it had .44% of the total registration.
