Yesterday I posted a story about an Approval Voting initiative petition that is currently circulating in Missouri. Another initiative petition that is circulating is for Ranked Choice Voting that, according to a story on kfvs.com, the link for which is below, would eliminate primaries in Missouri and have all candidates run in the General Election, with the winning candidate elected through RCV.

According to Ballotpedia, at least 107,426 signatures of MO registered voters will need to be collected to place any initiative on the November 2024 ballot. That number could be higher if more highly populated congressional districts are targeted by petitioners.

I also applaud the writer of this story who corrected Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s mischaracterization of RCV.

https://www.kfvs12.com/2023/06/13/petition-aims-place-ranked-choice-voting-question-2024-missouri-ballot/

On June 12, the U.S. District Court postponed the pretrial conference in Libertarian National Committee v Dean, e.d., 2:23cv-155. This is the case in which the Libertarian National Committee is suing Robert Klor Dean and his Tidewater Libertarian Party over trademark law. The conference had been set for June 15, but now it is postponed. No new date has been set yet. UPDATE: the conference is now set for June 22.

On June 13, on electionlawblog.org, Ned Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State, posted a paper forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal titled “Self-Districting: The Ultimate Antidote to Gerrymandering.” In the article, he reminds us that districts do not have to be geography-based. A district can be a subset of a state’s entire population and can be formed by like-minded individuals who can voluntarily organize and form a political district that is not necessarily geographically continuous. A person’s neighbors may be in his political district or be in a different district in a self-districting plan. While this would not affect certain elections (e.g., the single US House race in Wyoming), in elections with many seats to be decided (e.g., US House elections in California or the houses of all state legislatures), individuals in currently unelectable political minorities (e.g., Libertarians and Greens) could band together to elected representatives in single district elections and win seats in legislatures. The self-districting aspect of this plan would do away with state legislatures’ power to draw political district boundaries.

Here is Mr. Foley’s current paper on this topic:

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