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.

The Socialist Workers Party has had an exemption from reporting its campaign contributors, and its campaign expenditures, ever since 1979. But, whenever the Federal Election Commission grants the party this exemption, it always provides that the exemption will expire at a specified point in the future. The current exemption expires December 31, 2008. On October 30, the party asked that its exemption be extended. The Militant of November 17, 2008, has this article, explaining the basis for the request.

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the party deserved an exemption from disclosure of contributors, although on the matter of expenditures, the vote was 5-4 in the party’s favor. The case is Brown v Socialist Workers ’74 Campaign Committee, 459 US 87. That case arose in Ohio, where the issue was whether the party should have an exemption from disclosing information on contributors and expenditures for its candidates for state office.