A U.S. District Court in Philadelphia will hold an evidentiary hearing on October 28, at 1 p.m, in NAACP v Cortes, no. 08-cv-5048. This is the case filed October 23 that seeks to compel elections officials to provide emergency paper ballots in precincts, if half or more of the electronic vote-counting machines in that precinct break down. Current policy is that precincts will not be supplied with emergency paper ballots until all the machines break down.
Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, a Democrat from Boston, was defeated in the September 16 primary by 213 votes. The vote in the primary was Sonia Chang-Diaz 9,071; Wilkerson 8,858. Now Wilkerson is attempting to retain her seat by running as a write-in candidate in November against Chang-Diaz. There is no Republican in the race, but the Socialist Workers Party has a candidate on the ballot in this race, William Leonard.
Both Wilkerson and Chang-Diaz know quite a bit about running write-in campaigns, since they were both write-in candidates in the 2006 Democratic primary for that same seat. In the Democratic primary in 2006, no one had appeared on the ballot, and everyone was a write-in candidate. In that 2006 primary, Wilkerson had 6,478 write-ins, and her closest competitor, Chang-Diaz, had 5,711 write-ins.
Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel has asked the Georgia Supreme Court to remove Jim Powell from the November ballot. Powell won the August Democratic primary for one of the statewide partisan races for Public Service Commissioner. The Georgia Supreme Court heard oral arguments on October 20, and has not ruled yet (as of the morning of October 27). The Secretary of State believes that Powell has not lived in his district for an entire year before filing for the office. The case is Handel v Powell, S09A-0074. At the oral argument, some of the justices expressed doubt that it is possible to remove anyone from the ballot at this late date, since early voting already started.
On Friday, October 24, a U.S. District Court in Philadelphia released its opinion in Berg v Obama, civ 08-4083. Plaintiff Philip Berg had filed the lawsuit in August 2008, alleging that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen. The decision is here. It is 34 pages, but only deals with whether Berg has standing. The decision says he does not have standing. BAN regrets the Friday posting saying that the decision had made a finding about the factual dispute.
On October 27, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office reversed course and accepted Frank Moore’s write-in filing for president. Last week that office had said that the U.S. Constitution bars a team (of a presidential candidate and a vice-presidential candidate) from running if both members of the team live in the same state. That interpretation has now been dropped. The 12th amendment only stops such a team from receiving the electoral votes of their own home state.
Frank Moore is not on the ballot on any state, but he has qualified as a write-in presidential candidate in 25 states, probably a record. He also campaigns diligently. He and his campaign team have been working on getting write-in status for nine months. He lives in Berkeley, California.
