On March 14, a lawsuit was filed against the new District of Columbia law that lets non-citizen adults vote in Washington, D.C. elections for local office. Hall v D.C. Board of Elections, superior court, 2023-CAB-001544. Here is the Complaint. Thanks to Democracy Docket for the link.
Norman Ornstein, a well-known political scientist, and Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, have jointly written this attack on No Labels, which is published in The Bulwark. Ornstein is a Republican and Aftergut is a Democrat.
On March 17, the Minnesota House Election Finance & Policy Committee held an hour’s hearing on SF 2802, which doubles the vote test for qualified party status from 5% to 10%. The committee did not act on the bill, but seemed to indicate that the provisions of the bill will soon be amended into an omnibus election law bill, which does not exist yet.
Some of the legislators did express some sympathy for the idea of expanding the restrictive two-week petitioning period for non-presidential independent candidate petitions. It is possible that idea may be put into the omnibus bill.
There are uncontradicted court opinions that say it violates due process for a state to stiffen the definition of a qualified party, such that it threatens the status of a minor party, without giving that minor party one more election to try to surmount the new, tougher requirement. The bill would remove the Legal Marijuana Now Party from qualified status, before the 2024 election is held. That aspect of the bill would probably be struck down. In the past, when other states have made the definition of a qualified party more restrictive, and there was a qualified minor party on the ballot at that time, the states made the effective date after the next election; or if they didn’t, the state elections office, or a court, ruled they had to do that. These examples are from Alabama in 1982, Alabama in 1995, Indiana in 1980, Kansas in 1990, Michigan in 1976, Michigan in 1988, New Mexico in 1989, New York in 1935, New York in 2020, North Carolina in 1949, and Ohio in 2013.
On March 10, a state court lawsuit was filed against the new Arkansas law that requires statewide initiatives to contain a high number of signatures from each of 50 counties. King v Thurston, Pulaski County Circuit Court, 60cv-23-1816. The lead plaintiff is an Arkansas State Senator, Bryan King. The League of Women Voters of Arkansas is also a plaintiff.
The State Constitution says that initiatives need signatures from 15 counties, so obviously the legislature would have needed to initiate a constitutional amendment if it wanted signatures from 50 counties. But the legislature did not pass a constitutional amendment; it merely passed a statute. This lawsuit is very likely to win.
On March 16, the Arkansas Senate State Agencies & Governmental Affairs Committee passed SB 277, the bill to lower the number of signatures for a newly-qualifying party from 3% of the last gubernatorial vote (about 27,000 signatures) to exactly 10,000 signatures. The bill had failed in that committee in February, but was brought back.
