On May 3, Vermont Representative Jarrod Sammis announced that he has left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarian Party. See this story. Sammis is in his first term, and represents the Rutland-3 district.
In Vermont, the voter registration form does not ask for party, so party affiliation is simply by the individual’s own declaration. Thanks to Bill Redpath for this news.
According to this story, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro supports moving the 2024 primary for all office from April to March. The article says the main opposition to the move comes from people concerned that primary candidates would need to petition in the Christmas-New Years week. It doesn’t seem to occur to Pennsylvania legislators that they don’t need to require primary candidates to submit petitions. Over half the states do not require primary candidates to submit petitions to get on a primary ballot. Instead they depend on filing fees. Pennsylvania already has filing fees, but they are minimal amounts of money.
On May 2, the Hawaii legislature passed SB 141. It says that if a presidential elector doesn’t vote for the presidential nominee that he or she had been expected to vote for, that elector is replaced with someone else.
In August 2017, some Georgia voters filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the Georgia vote-counting system is not reliable and the election results are not subject to being audited. Curling v Raffensperger, Superior Court, Fulton County, 2017cv-292233. A few weeks later it was removed to federal court, Curling v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-02989. It was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg, an Obama appointee.
On May 2, 2023, a five-hour hearing was held to determine if there will be a trial. See this story. One of the reasons the case has taken so long is that in 2019, the Georgia legislature passed HB 316, which provided that all the voting machines should be refigured to produce a ballot marking device, a piece of paper handed to every voter after the voter finishes voting. The paper tells the voter which candidates the voter voted for. Plaintiffs are not satisfied with this modification, because they argue the paper produced by the machine doesn’t necessarily prove that the machine actually recorded the results in conformity to what the paper shows. Instead they want a paper ballot marked by the voter and then read by an optical scanner. With that system, the paper ballots themselves could always be counted by hand, if there were any doubt that the optical scanner had done a good job.
This case is possibly the most complex election law case ever filed, with tens of thousands of pages of documents already filed.
Proponents of abolishing the ability of parties to have nominees will attempt to get a top-four initiative on the ballot in Idaho. They have filed the initial paperwork with Idaho officials, but the petitioning won’t start for a while. See this story.
