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.

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.

On October 21, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the order of the Commonwealth Court in Republican National Committee v Chapman, 100 MAP 2022. The vote is 3-3, because there are only six justices on the court, due to the death of a justice a few weeks ago. On a tie vote, the ruling of the lower court stands.

The issue was whether county election boards may have procedures to notify a postal ballot voter that there is a problem with the ballot, and give that voter a chance to fix the problem. The Supreme Court did not write any text. Here is the order.