On December 7, proponents of an advisory Illinois initiative asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case. The 7th circuit had upheld Illinois laws on how advisory initiative petitions are circulated and checked. Specifically, Illinois law requires that election officials check a random sample of 10% of the signatures, and if the sample reveals that the number of valid signatures is less than 95% of the legal requirement, the petition is deemed invalid. The initiative proponents also challenge the law that prevents them from mixing signatures from different counties on the same sheet of paper (also certain cities must also be separated out).

The case is Protect Marriage Illinois v Orr, 06-787.

This makes at least 7 election law cases now in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. None of them has yet been chosen to be heard by that court. The others are:
1. New York State Bd. of Elections v Lopez Torres, 06-766 (primary ballot access)
2. Nader v Seroty, 06-696 (mandatory costs assessed against a candidate who is removed from the ballot, Pennsylvania)
3. Romanelli v Election Board, 06-742 (procedures for checking petitions, Pennsylvania)
4. Initiative & Referendum Institute v Utah, 06-534 (can state require initiatives on certain subjects to receive two-thirds of vote?)
5. Wexler v Anderson, 06-401 (are vote-counting machines with no audit trail unconstitutional?)
6. Washington v Republican Party, 06-713 & 06-730 (is top-two primary unconstitutional when party objects and when party labels are placed on ballot?)

A bill to move the New Jersey presidential primary to the first Tuesday in February passed the State Senate on December 4. The Assembly will take up the bill when the legislature re-convenes in January 2007. The bills are S2193 and A3832. The Senate passed S2193 by a vote of 33-5.

The only four states that still haven’t released their official November 2006 election returns are Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The Pennsylvania returns will be especially interesting, since the state elections department has indicated it will include write-ins (something that Pennsylvania has not done, for the most part, during the last 20 years).