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Hotspots: Key Post-Election Disputes in the States

Election Law Society · November 26, 2010 ·

Keep checking back here for links to the latest state midterm election results and recount coverage

LINKS BY STATE:

Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois (Gubernatorial, House), Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri,New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington

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Alaska

Joe Miller, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alaska, will probably require a hand recount of the write-in votes before he will concede the race.

Wednesday night, Democrat Scott McAdams conceded the race after only getting 23% of the vote.

Murkowski and Miller are preparing for the next round of ballot counting that will begin next week. Murkowski has set up a separate campaign account to support campaign efforts in the counting process.

Joe Miller is questioning the fairness of the process and has filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent misspelled ballots being counted for Senator Lisa Murkowski.

The Associated Press reports that a federal court judge has denied Republican Joe Miller’s request for an injunction to stop the counting of incorrectly spelled write-in ballots.

Live coverage of the counting is being streamed online.

The Court has rejected Miller’s request to stop the recount. The count now shows Murkowski with 98% of the initial write-in vote.

Joe Miller’s prospects for victory are getting slimmer, and the lawyers are starting to leave Alaska.

Alaska election officials have completed the fifth day of counting write-in ballots. Senator Lisa Murkowski has retained 89% of write-in votes

With almost all votes counted, Senator Lisa Murkowski currently has an edge of over 2,000 votes over Republican Joe Miller. Murkowski’s total does not include the over 10,000 challenged ballots.

As counting ends, Murkowski is heading back home and is expected to declare victory soon. 8,135 ballots have been challenged, but even if all of those ballots were thrown out by the Court, Murkowski would still be ahead by more than 2,000 votes.

With all but 700 write-in votes counted, Senator Lisa Murkowski has declared victory over Republican candidate Joe Miller. The AP called the race for Murkowski Wednesday evening.

Joe Miller is asking a federal judge to stop election officials from certifying results declaring Murkowski the winner. Murkowski leads by about 10,400 votes; Miller has challenged 8,153 of the ballots counted for Murkowski.

A federal judge has granted Joe Miller (R) a temporary injunction preventing election officials from naming Senator Lisa Murkowski the winner. Miller filed his complaint on the grounds that the counting of misspelled ballots for Murkowski violates state law. Miller will now bring the issue to state court.

Attorneys for the state of Alaska have asked a judge to decide the case over contested absentee ballots by next week. The case will be heard Wednesday in state court in Juneau. Senator Lisa Murkowski is seeking to intervene in the suit. Her attorneys have said her seniority will be in jeopardy if she is not sworn in when the new Congress meets in January. [Read more…] about Hotspots: Key Post-Election Disputes in the States

Weekly Wrap Up

Election Law Society · November 12, 2010 ·

“I want to be your second (or third) choice!”: Jean Quan, Oakland’s mayor-elect, won under the city’s new ranked-choice system by concentrating on being voters’ second and third choice, if they were voting for someone else. The campaign manager for Don Pereta, the heavy favorite in the race, said Quan was “gaming the system” by asking people who supported other candidates to rank her second or third.

Too poor to vote: The ACLU is challenging a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals 2-1 decision that Tennessee could bar three released felons who were behind on child support or restitution from regaining their voting rights. The ACLU is asking for the court to rehear the case en banc, arguing that the decision creates an unconstitutional poll tax.

Sound it out: In the Alaska Senate race, the Division of Elections has only accepted a few of Joe Miller’s challenges to the spelling of his opponent, Lisa Murkowski’s, name on the write-in ballots. The Director of the Division of Elections said that she was accepting minor spelling mistakes as long as she could “pronounce the name by the way it’s spelled.”

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: The spending from outside groups in this campaign season has reached record highs, climbing almost to the $300 million mark. Now, a new study has shown that nearly half of that money comes from groups which won’t reveal the money’s source. A few notable candidates who used a huge amount of their personal fortunes are Meg Whitman in California and Linda McMahon in Connecticut. They spent $140 million and $46 million respectively.

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You Know What Election Day Needs? More Stickers!

Election Law Society · October 25, 2010 ·

Can you spell Nakamura? San Diego School Board trustee Katherine Nakamura, who is attempting a write-in reelection bid, thinks it’s a doozy, and wants her voters to be able to use stickers with her name pre-printed on them. Unfortunately for her, she lost in the primary election, and San Diego city rules say that write-in campaigns are not permitted. Nakamura has brought her case before the California Superior Court, requesting that she be permitted to stage a write-in campaign and that voters be permitted to place stickers with her name on them on the ballot, rather than actually writing in her name. The court has yet to decide whether any write-in votes will count, but it gave Nakamura the green light to seek the 200 signatures required to qualify as a write-in candidate. The court did decide, though, that Nakamura can distribute stickers, and that voters can bring the stickers to the polling places, but that they may not paste them on the ballot. Indeed, California law prohibits the use of stickers to express votes for write-in candidates. Does this law make sense? Is it constitutional? This post seeks to analyze the arguments for and against such a law.

In 1926, the California Supreme Court decided that the placement of a sticker on a ballot is not “writing,” and as such is not a permissible way to vote for a write-in candidate. In support of its position, the court explained the repercussions of allowing the use of stickers, quoting the Illinois Supreme Court: “[I]f [stickers] may be resorted to by one candidate, they may be by all, and the official ballot might become but little more than a convenient card upon which to paste private tickets printed and circulated in secret. The use of such tickets would revive the evils sought to be guarded against by ballot law.” [Read more…] about You Know What Election Day Needs? More Stickers!

Weekly Wrap-Up

Election Law Society · September 17, 2010 ·

“Lisa M. Write In and Fill In” is the proposed slogan from supporters of Lisa Murkowski’s proposed write-in campaign. Alaska elections director said that voters would only have to use Murkowski’s first name and last initial for it to count, but that they would also have to be sure to fill in the bubble next to her name. The actual vote is the filled in bubble, not the written name.

Carl P. Paladino, a Republican candidate for governor in New York, sent out a typical negative mailing stating that “Something really stinks in Albany.” However, the ad is anything but typical as soon as a person opens the envelope and is greeted with the “unmistakable odor” of “rotting vegetables.” Read this article for more info. [Read more…] about Weekly Wrap-Up

Yes/No, No/Yes: Two California Redistricting Bills Compete for Votes

Election Law Society · September 15, 2010 ·

Last Sunday, two competing editorials were published in the San Francisco Chronicle discussing two proposed redistricting bills in California, Proposition 20 and Proposition 27. Both propositions focus on changing the Congressional redistricting process. Proposition 20 would give the task to the Citizen Redistricting Commission, which already draws the lines for the legislative districts. Proposition 27 would have the Legislature do it, but impose public oversight and strict guidelines on the process. The editorials dealing with these propositions took opposite views: Daniel Lowenstein of UCLA supported Proposition 27, saying it would reduce the cost and create equal districts; Alice Huffman, president of the NAACP, argued that Proposition 20 would prevent districts from being drawn for the benefit of politicians. Both disagreed strongly with the claims in the other.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As is usually the case, the answer is not black and white.