Liz Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” on October 23. She predicted a new conservative party, if the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump in 2024. See this story.
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On October 23, the New York Daily News carried an editorial, criticizing the Second Circuit for refusing to give any ballot access relief to the Libertarian and Green Parties, and for not even explaining its reasoning. As the editorial notes, the opinion is one sentence long, saying there is nothing wrong with the U.S. District Court opinion earlier that upheld the 2020 ballot access rules.
There is much wrong with the U.S. District Court decision. It said that New York is justified in keeping minor parties off the ballot because otherwise the state would need to waste money on public funding for minor party candidates. This was fallacious because the Second Circuit had already ruled in a Connecticut case that if a state has public funding, it can restrict it to the major parties. Also, the U.S. District Court made errors of fact when it compared New York’s ballot access rules to the laws of other states. The U.S. District Court ignored all of the evidence that the minor parties had presented about the failure of New York to even have a procedure for a group to transform itself into a qualified party in advance of any election. The U.S. District Court didn’t discuss why the petitioning period should be squeezed into a six-week period, when a majority of state allow unlimited petitioning period.
New York has three candidates for U.S. Senate on the November 2022 ballot, the Democratic and Republican nominees, and independent candidate Diane Sare. Spectrum News is sponsoring a Senate debate on October 30, but it has only invited candidates who are at 15% at the polls. However, there is no poll in New York that has asked respondents about their support for Sare. All four of the polls relied on by Spectrum News have asked respondents if they favor the Republican or the Democrat, and did not ask respondents about anyone else, not even the generic “other.”
On October 21, the Alaska Supreme Court issued its opinion in Kohlhaas v state. The opinion is unanimous and is 57 pages. It explains why it had ruled on January 19, 2022, that the top-four initiative is constitutional. The oral argument had been on January 18, and the next day the court had said the initiative is constitutional and that it would explain later. Now it has issued its explanation.
The most interesting part of the decision is the Court’s criticism of the Maine Supreme Court’s 2017 decision that had held that ranked choice voting violates the Maine Constitution, as applied to state office. Maine still lacks ranked choice voting for state office, in general elections (but not primaries) because the Maine Supreme Court ruled that ranked choice voting conflicts with a provision of the Maine Constitution that requires plurality elections for state office.
Last week, it was revealed that Schuyler County, Illinois ballots for November 8, 2022, list the wrong Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. The ballots have since been reprinted, but some votes had already been cast. See this story. Schuyler County is an overwhelmingly Republican county; in November 2020, Donald Trump received 71.0% of the vote in the county. Thanks to Bill Redpath for the link.