On April 17, the voters of Springfield, Illinois, will vote on whether to allow Instant-Runoff Voting for overseas absentee voters, in elections for city office. The city council has already approved the idea. Thanks to Dan Johnson-Weinberger for this news.
The New Jersey lawsuit filed by several minor parties on October 13, 2006 has moved slowly. The parties have given the state an extension until the first week in February 2007 to answer their complaint. The lawsuit complains about these problems: (1) the state has not fully implemented the 2001 decision on letting voters register into unqualified parties; (2) qualified parties, which means only the Democratic and Republican Parties, can receive higher contributions than other parties; (3) qualified parties can make unlimited donations to their nominees, while other parties can’t; (4) qualified parties are exempt from lobbying fees, whereas other parties aren’t; (5) members of qualified parties can circulate petitions to get themselves on the primary ballot whether they live in that district or not, but members of unqualified parties cannot circulate a petition outside their home district (if the petition is for district office). The case is called Green Party of N.J. et al v State, no. MER-C-125-06.
Lowell Finley, co-founder of Voter Action, was named one of California’s new Deputy Secretaries of State on January 8. Voter Action exists to fight electronic vote-counting technology. See http://voteraction.org for more information about the organization. Lowell Finley has been serving as an attorney for Voter Action’s lawsuits, but his new job requires him to resign from that role. His new job for the new California Secretary of State is Deputy Secretary of State for Voting Systems Technology and Policy.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear both election law cases that had been on its January 5 conference. They are Nader v Seroty and Wexler v Anderson. See post below (2 posts down) to know what these cases were about.
Oregon State Senator Ben Westlund said on January 7 that he will soon introduce a bill to repeal Oregon’s primary screen-out law. That law was passed in 2005. It makes it illegal for primary voters to sign a petition for an independent candidate. Westlund is a Democrat now, although he was an independent last year, and previously he had been a Republican.
