The OSCE has issued a preliminary report on the U.S. election of November 8, 2022. The OSCE is the ongoing organization formed by the Helsinki Accords nations. It monitors human rights in the countries that signed the Accords.

The Report criticizes U.S. ballot access laws. The chapter is titled “Candidate Registration” and begins on page fourteen. Footnote 76 has a link to the cert petition in Cowen v Raffensperger, the Georgia ballot access case which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear last month.

Not one daily newspaper in the United States mentioned that the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to hear the case. Therefore, it is very good that the OSCE took note of the case. As readers of this blog probably already know, the issue was the Georgia ballot access law governing U.S. House elections. The law is so draconian, no third party has ever been able to comply with it, since it was passed in 1943. And no independent candidate has been able to comply with it since 1964, and back then, the petition was not due until October, the signatures were not checked, notarization was not needed, and U.S. House district boundaries did not cross county lines. Thanks to ElectionLawBlog for the link.

On November 8, North Dakota voters passed an initiative to amend the state constitution and provide for term limits for Governors and state legislators. It passed with over 63% of the vote. This initiative only got on the ballot because the State Supreme Court overturned the Secretary of State’s decision to keep it off the ballot.

The November 8 election resulted in the Democratic Party winning control of both houses of the Minnesota legislature. For some time the Democrats have had a majority in the House but not in the Senate.

Governor Tim Walz is a Democrat. Now that Democrats can pass their favored legislation, it is somewhat likely that a bill will be passed to give parties, or at least small qualified parties, more control over their nominations process. Both the Legal Marijuana Now Party and the Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party must nominate by primary. There is no registration by party in Minnesota, so any person can enter any party’s primary merely by paying a filing fee.

For the past two elections, Republicans have entered candidates in the primaries of those two parties for insincere reasons. They don’t care about drug legalization but they perceive that most voters who vote for the two pro-marijuana parties would vote Democratic in the absence of a third party choice. They seize the nomination of one of the two minor parties hoping to affect the general election vote. The two minor parties themselves are upset by this behavior, but have been powerless to do anything about it. But the election law might be changed in 2023 to let them have more control over their primaries.

The Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party is no longer a qualified party, but the Legal Marijuana Now Party is. Neither party got 5% for any statewide race on November 8, 2022. But the Legal Marijuana Now Party got over 5% for U.S. Senate in 2020, so it is still on the ballot.

Now that Democrats can enact their agenda, though, marijuana is likely to become legal in 2023, and the entire rationale for the continued existence of the Legal Marijuana Party will diminish.