Voters in three California cities, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro, approved use if Instant-Runoff Voting in certain city elections, some time ago. However, IRV has not yet been used in those cities because the vote-counting systems haven’t been ready for it. All three cities are in Alameda County, which uses electronic vote-counting equipment made by Sequoia Voting Systems.

According to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, Sequoia expects to have the machines ready in time to use IRV in city elections in the spring of 2008.

On January 28, the State Commmittee of the New York Independence Party passed a new bylaw. It says the state leadership can displace the leadership in any county, even if the county leadership was elected by committeemembers who had won the party’s primary. It is not clear that this new bylaw can be enforced against state election law; the matter will be in court soon. The motivation of the New York Independence Party state leadership was, as before, to eliminate allies of Lenora Fulani. Fulani allies won control of the party in most boroughs of New York state by electing a majority of the county committee in the party’s most recent primary.

On January 26, Michael J. Madison, speaker of the Illinois House for 24 years, introduced HB 426. It moves the primary in presidential election years from the 3rd Tuesday in March to the 1st Tuesday in February. The bill has four other co-sponsors, all Democrats. Democrats control both houses of the Illinois legislature and the Governorship, so this bill will probably pass.

If the bill passed, Illinois would hold its primary for all office, not just president, in February (in presidential years). This would be the first time that any state had ever held a primary for Congress so far removed in time from the November election. Madigan says it would be too complicated to hold a presidential primary in February and a primary for all other office later in the year. Thanks to The Green Papers for this news.