The U.S. Supreme Court has posted the transcript of the March 23 oral argument in Watson v Republican National Committee, 24-1260. Like all U.S. Supreme Court transcripts, it has an index of every word (other than extremely common words like “the”) spoken. Here is the transcript.

Even though the Libertarian Party of Mississippi is a party to the case, that seems to have made no difference. No attorney and no justice made reference to the Libertarian Party of Mississippi. The index does not include the word “Libertarian.”

The Mississippi Libertarian Party is on the same side as the Republican National Committee. Both parties believe that when Congress in 1872 told states to hold congressional elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, that implicitly meant that all ballots must be received by the election administrators by the end of election day.

Some of the justices seemed to concentrate on some extremely unlikely hypotheticals. For example, Justice Gorsuch seemed fascinated by the idea that voters who used the postal service could ask the postal service to return their ballots after that voter had already put the ballot in the mail. He felt this might happen if there was a revelation of a scandal that became known the date after election day.

Joel Gilbert, a California voter who had sued the Secretary of State to require an investigation into the qualifications of Eric Swalwell to run for Governor of California, has filed an appeal from the March 23 decision of a trial court that said the Secretary of State has no duty. The appeal case number in the Third Appellate District is C105907.

On the evening of March 23, the University of Southern California cancelled its March 24 gubernatorial debate. See this story. The sponsors had invited one candidate, Matt Mahan, and excluded Xavier Beccera, even though Becerra led Mahan in all of the recent polls.

The University issued this statement: “USC vigorously defends the independence, objectivity, and integrity of USC Professor Christian Grose, whose data-driven candidate viability formula is based on extensive research and enjoys broad academic support. At the same time, we recognize that concerns about the selection criteria for tomorrow’s gubernatorial debate have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters. Unfortunately, USC and KABC have not been able to reach an agreement on expanding the number of candidates at tomorrow’s debate. As a result, USC has made the difficult decision to cancel tomorrow’s debate and will look for other opportunities to educate voters on the candidates and issues.”