This article, published in Fox News in Georgia, features the account of an elderly couple who recently lost their government Photo-ID in a house fire, and therefore won’t be able to vote in the July 15 primary. The July 15 primary is Georgia’s first election in which the requirement that voters at the polls show government ID is in effect.
The Boston Globe of July 14 has this op-ed by Political Science Professor David Lewis Schaefer, of the College of the Holy Cross. The op-ed opposes the National Popular Vote Plan, which will probably receive a vote in the Massachusetts Senate in a few days (HB 678).
The op-ed says the plan “has the effect of denying smaller states the extra electoral weight that the current system provides them.” That sentence is not true. Each state would continue to have just as many electoral votes, under the plan, as it does today. The plan does not abolish the electoral college and does (and could not) alter the number of electoral votes each state would continue to possess. Furthermore, the states that have already passed the plan or would have passed the plan if the governor hadn’t vetoed it, are disproportionately small states. Of the seven states in which the plan has passed the legislature, three (Hawaii, Vermont and Rhode Island) have just 3 or 4 electoral votes.
On June 14, a Maine Superior Court ruled that independent U.S. Senate candidate Herbert Hoffman should remain on the ballot. Knutson v Department of the Secretary of State, AP-08-49. The Secretary of State had ruled that Hoffman’s petition has 4,038 valid signatures. He needed 4,000. John Knutson, state chair of the Maine Democratic Party, had then sued the Secretary of State, charging that Hoffman should be off the ballot.
Everyone agrees that more than 4,000 registered voters signed the petition. The disagreement stems from the fact that three particular signers charged that the person who asked them to sign the petition was not the same person who signed off on that petititon sheet as the witness. The Secretary of State had not counted those three signatures, but the Democratic Party wants those entire sheets invalidated, instead of just the three particular signers. The witness does not need to be the person who spoke to the voter; the witness just needs to be someone who was in the presence of the voter. The Secretary of State, and the Superior Court, define “in the presense of” to mean “close proximity coupled with awareness.” Therefore, they said that there is no evidence that the witness wasn’t “in the presense of” the other signers on those sheets.
From a common-sense viewpoint, one wonders what difference it makes who circulated the petition, as long as the petition was signed by the proper number of registered voters. There are about a dozen states which don’t even require the circulator to sign the petition forms, and therefore no one even knows or cares who circulated the petition. These states just care how many registered voters signed the petition. Thanks to David Bright for this news.
According to this story in the Daily News of July 13, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg donated $150,000 to the Independence Party, two months ago. The money was a “thank you” for all the work the party did to promote a possible independent presidential run by the Mayor, last year and early this year. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has this story, dated July 14, on the illegal use of public employees to participate in the “private” challenge to Ralph Nader’s 2004 petition, and Carl Romanelli’s 2006 petition. The quote from a spokesperson near the end of the article, claiming that both candidates “falsified” their petitions, is untrue. No one ever accused either candidate of anything worse than having petitions with many invalid signatures. There is no logical connection between invalid signatures on a petition, and a charge of “falsification” of petitions. “Falsification” implies forgery.
