During 2008, salary for members of Congress has been $169,300. On January 1, 2009, it rises to $174,000. Every time the salary goes up, filing fees also go up, in the states in which the filing fee is a percentage of the salary.
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On December 23, the Alabama ballot access case called Shugart v Chapman was removed from the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, to the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, at the state’s request. The suit challenges the number of signatures needed for an independent candidate for U.S. House. The lawsuit points out that in the district at issue, the law requires over 6,100 valid signatures, whereas the state only requires 5,000 signatures for an independent presidential candidate. The case is now assigned to U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Capel.
In 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot require more signatures for an office in just part of the state, than for a statewide office. The Alabama case had been filed in Birmingham because the district is near Birmingham, but the state argued that the case should have been filed in Montgomery because the Secretary of State’s office is there.
The markcrispinmiller.com blog has this interesting comparison of Nevada state security rules for gambling machines, versus the normal state oversight for electronic vote-counting machines. Most significant is that Nevada requires the users of gambling equipment to reveal the software to the government office that regulates gambling. Manufacturers of electronic vote-counting machines have always fiercely resisted sharing their software with state elections officials. Thanks to Ed Still’s VoteLaw blog for the link.
Professor James T. Bennett has just published “Stifling Political Competition: How Government Has Rigged the System to Benefit Demopublicans and Exclude Third Parties.” The publisher is the prestigious Springer Company, which is the world’s largest publisher of books on science, technology and medicine. Springer has published over 150 Nobel prize-winners. Professor Bennett is an Eminent Scholar at George Mason University and holds the William P. Snavely Chair of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Economics Department. He is the founder and director of the Journal of Labor Research.
http://restoretheconstitutionalrepublic.org has a comment by a Texan who says that he or she recently talked on the phone with Congressman Ron Paul about the meaning of “natural-born” in Article II, for presidential qualification. According to the comment, Paul said, “There is no law that actually defines ‘natural born’, so the argument could go on forever with thousands of different interpretations. The consensus is that he is a U.S. citizen, and therefore eligible.” Thanks to Bill Van Allen.