On April 11, the Montana Senate State Administration Committee tabled HB 797, which had earlier passed the House. It moved the presidential primary from June to February.
Reply
On April 16, Connecticut SB 1184 cleared all preliminary committees and will soon receive a vote on the Senate floor. It moves the presidential primary from March to February 5.
On April 16, Nigeria’s highest court ruled that one of the presidential candidates had been removed from the ballot illegally, and ordered him reinstated. The presidential election is scheduled for April 21. The Electoral Commission said it could cope, even though millions of ballots had already been printed without his name. The excluded candidate is Atiku Abubakar, the current vice-president. He was removed from the ballot last month because the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had ruled that he is corrupt. The Commission removed other candidates for lesser office from the ballot as well, but critics noted that most of the candidates removed by the Commission are opposed to the governing Peoples Democratic Party.
Atiku Abubakar is the presidential candidate of the newly-formed Action Congress Party. His chief opponent is Umaru Yar’ Adua. Both are Muslim.
On April 18, the U.S. Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing, on the subject of possibly repealing limits in the McCain-Feingold law on how much money political parties may spend on behalf of their own nominees. Speakers in favor include John Samples of the CATO Institute, and attorney Marc Elias. Speakers opposed to the idea are Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, Dr. Thomas E. Mann of The Brookings Institution, and Gary Kalman of U.S. Pirg.
Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news.
On April 12, a California Superior Court in Alameda County ruled that when voters exercise their statutory right to a recount, elections officials must produce information from “inside” electronic vote-counting machines. The case was filed in November 2004, after Alameda County was asked to recount the vote on a ballot measure, Berkeley’s Measure R. Alameda County used Diebold electronic touchscreen machines for voters at the polls (voters who voted by mail used paper ballots). Supporters of Measure R, which had narrowly been defeated, asked to see back-up data that is stored inside the machines. They also asked to see the audit logs generated by the vote-counting system that show whether the system functioned properly. Finally, they asked to examine the results of “Logic & Accuracy” testing that had been performed on the machines before and after the election. The county had denied all three requests.
The judge said that the plain meaning of the word “recount” required the county to produce all the requested records. The court also cited the California Constitution (Article II, sec. 2.5), which protects the right to have a valid vote counted. Finally, the court cited Bush v Gore, and said that since the absentee mail votes could be recounted, that the voters who voted at the polls were treated differently, and the differential violates equal protection. Since the machines no longer contain the requested data, another hearing will be held on May 4 to determine whether the county should be sanctioned for not preserving the records. The case is Americans for Safe Access v County of Alameda, RG04-192053. It took this long to get a decision because initially the Superior Court had denied relief, but the State Court of Appeals last year had remanded the case back to the lower court with instructions to hear it over again.