On August 31, the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, refused to rehear Stein v Federal Election Commission, 21-1213. This is the lawsuit over the government’s attempt to force Jill Stein, Green Party presidential nominee in 2016, to repay some of the primary season matching funds she had been given.
The No Labels Party is continuing to register voters as party members, in the party’s quest to have at least 5,000 registered members by January 2024. See this story. The party’s canvassers now wear T-shirts making it clear they are asking people to join their party.
The story says the party has added 454 new members in September, so they now have 6,609, even after the Secretary of State subtracted about 800 members.
Fusion voting has gotten a fair amount of notice in recent months as new centrist political parties in New Jersey and Michigan have each announced intentions to overturn their state’s ban on fusion as an unconstitutional abridgment of fundamental political rights.
Fusion voting was once legal and common in the United States, but today it is generally unknown or, even more commonly, misunderstood. Specifically, two very different forms of balloting, with very different consequences for minor parties and their members’ associational rights, are often not distinguished. They should be.
A “fusion voting” regime is one in which more than one political party can show its support of a candidate on its own ballot line, with votes cast on that line added to votes on other nominating parties’ lines to produce the candidate’s final total. In the hypothetical below, for example, Claire Farmer appears not only on the Democratic Party line but also on the Common Sense Party’s one.
On September 6 the New Jersey Supreme Court declined to accept the lawsuit In re Tom Malinowski, 088473. This is the lawsuit filed in 2022 in New Jersey state court, arguing that the ban on fusion violates the New Jersey Constitution. There has never been a decision in this case, in any court. It will now proceed in the State Appellate court. The plaintiffs had thought that perhaps the State Supreme Court would like to hear this case even before it has had a decision in any lower court.
According to news stories from Idaho, the Idaho House of Representatives does not support efforts to call a special session to restore presidential primaries. So Idaho will almost certainly use caucuses next year instead.
The Constitution Party of Idaho has a policy of not listing any presidential nominee in November who had not won the party’s Idaho presidential primary, but that policy has no meaning if there is no primary.
