On February 15, the Federal Election Commission informed the U.S. Supreme Court that the FEC doesn’t intend to respond to Jill Stein’s cert petition. Stein v FEC, 23-771. The issue is how to calculate primary season matching funds. The FEC believes that Stein was overpaid in 2016 and wants some of its money back. The FEC had changed the rules on the matching period, to the detriment of Stein. It said that contributions she received after she won the Green Party nomination, but before she lost the Peace & Freedom nomination, can’t be matched.

So admitted True the Vote yesterday. Here is the story from the Associated Press.

Former California legislator Steve Peace has this article at Independent Voter News, saying it is time for California to abandon the top-two system created in 2010, and switch to a top-four or a top-five system with Ranked Choice Voting.

Peace was one of the leading actors in the creation of the top-two system in California, which was put on the ballot by the legislature after then-Senator Abel Maldonado, a Republican, said he would vote for the state budget if the legislature put top-two on the ballot. Maldonado, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Peace all worked together. At the time the California constitution required the state budget to pass with a two-thirds vote in each house. Republicans wouldn’t vote for the budget, and the stalemate, lasting over a month, created havoc.

Peace’s new article shows how top-two in California has motivated dirty tricks. Major party candidates sometimes run phony ads that ostensibly are for the purpose of boosting another candidate in the same race who is of the opposite major party. The motive is to manipulate the system so that the true sponsor of the ads can defeat his or her chief rival from the same party.