Alabama has the nation’s most severe mandatory petition requirement for statewide party recognition, 3% of the last gubernatorial vote. No other state has a mandatory party recognition petition that is above 2% of the last vote cast.

However, the Alabama petition requirement for 2024 and 2026 is now lower than it was for 2020 and 2022. The 2020 and 2022 petition required 51,588 signatures. But the future petition is 42,459 signatures, due to a lower voter turnout in November 2022 than in November 2018.

The word “mandatory” means that the petition is required if a new party is to appear on the ballot. California, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, have two procedures for new parties to appear on the ballot. For example, California has a 10% petition, but it is not mandatory, because a group that doesn’t want to use it is free to use the .33% registration procedure.

On January 6, a 3-judge U.S. District Court struck down the South Carolina U.S. House boundaries for the First District as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP v Alexander, 3:21cv-3302. Here is the decision. The court asks the legislature to draw new boundaries by March 31, 2023. If the legislature does not do that, presumably the court will appoint a special master to draw new boundaries.

The decision is from Judge Toby Heytens (a Biden appointee), Mary Geiger Lewis (Obama), and Richard M. Gergel (Obama). Thanks to ElectionLawBlog for the link.

Twenty U.S. House Republicans have been voting against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker. This blog post takes no position on the wisdom of these Representatives’ decision not to vote for their party’s nominee for Speaker. But it seems obvious that the twenty are not “centrists”, or “moderates”.

Open primaries, and proponents of eliminating party nominees in public elections, constantly claim that letting independent voters vote in primaries produce more moderate office-holders. Yet among the twenty who won’t vote for McCarthy, fourteen of them are from states in which independent voters can vote in Republican primaries.

Here is the list of the twenty. The six who are from closed primary states are one from Oklahoma, three from Florida, one from Pennsylvania, and one from Maryland.