On October 28, a lawsuit was filed to overturn Ohio’s county distribution requirement for statewide initiatives. The case is Citizens in Charge v Brunner, U.S. Dist. Court, Columbus, 08-1014. Similar lawsuits have won against initiative ballot access requirements in Nevada, Idaho and Utah. These lawsuits are all based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision Moore v Ogilvie, from 1969, which invalidated Illinois’ county distribution requirement for statewide independent candidate petitions.

County distribution requirements say the petition is invalid unless it has some specified number of signatures from a particular number of counties. The U.S. Supreme Court decision is based on the fact that counties vary widely in population. So if an initiative, or a candidate, is well-supported in low-population counties, that initiative or candidate can easily overcome the county distribution requirement. But if an initiative or candidate is supported mostly in counties with large populations, the county distribution requirement interferes with the ability to get on the ballot. There are five states (Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Nevada, and Rhode Island) in which over half the population lives in a single county.

Courts have struck down all county distribution requirements for candidate and new/minor party petitions, except that Pennsylvania still has it for statewide candidates seeking a place on a primary ballot, and also in 2007 Nebraska passed it for non-presidential statewide independent candidates.

District of Columbia non-voting Delegate to the U.S. House Eleanor Holmes Norton says she will re-introduce her D.C. voting rights bill, and it will be virtually identical to last year’s bill. This means it will include a new seat in the U.S. House for Utah, and one for the District of Columbia. See this article.

She also says it is virtually certain to pass. Last year it passed in the House, but failed in the Senate. This year, she says 65 members of the new Senate support the bill.

Her decision to reintroduce the old bill was not obvious. Some D.C. voting rights advocates wanted the bill to include two U.S. Senators. Others wanted her to introduce a bill to make D.C. a state. It seems no member of Congress wants to introduce a bill, or a Constitutional Amendment, to put D.C. back into Maryland.

In every presidential election starting in 1888, at least one socialist party has participated. The Socialist Labor Party ran a slate of unpledged presidential electors in 1888 in New York state.

If one adds together the presidential vote of all the parties with these words in their party name: “Socialist”, “Communist”, “Socialism” and “Workers”, and calculates the percentage of the vote cast for such parties for president, one finds that the lowest percentage in history was in 2000, when such parties polled less than .02% of the vote. 2008 appears likely to be the second such presidential election. The combined vote in 2008 for the Socialist Workers, Socialist, and Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential candidates appears to be just barely under .02% (specifically, .019%). The worst year for such parties for president was 2000, when it was only .017%. In 2004 the percentage was .021%.