William & Mary Law School | Election Law Society
By: Matthew Hubbard
In 2014, Oregonians voted on Ballot Measure 90, which aimed to overhaul the state’s primary election system by establishing a nonpartisan blanket primary. A form of open primary, a nonpartisan blanket primary system requires all candidates for a political office to participate in a single primary. The top two vote getters from this primary advance to the general election, regardless of their stated party affiliation.
By: Eleyse D’Andrea
Debate over partisanship has been a major point of contention throughout American history. Nonpartisanship in the early twentieth century focused on removing party politics from election processes to lessen the power and influence of political machines on citizens’ voting decisions. At the other end of the spectrum, proponents of partisan structure supported the positive role of political parties as a means of mobilizing citizens to participate in the political process, and furthermore lauded party identification on ballots as central to informed voting. In today’s America, partisanship is common and party ballot identification is a central element of many voting models. Nebraska, however, stands alone as the only state to remove party labels from state legislature ballots
By: Will Cooke
Several legislative districts in Arizona are potentially in flux as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Rooted in the ongoing debate about the permissible degree of population deviation in state districts, the plaintiffs in the case focus their argument on the strong correlation between political ideology and the population of a district. As the graph below demonstrates, eleven of the thirteen Democrat-leaning legislative districts in the state contain total populations below the “ideal district size” (or the size of a district if drawn with perfect uniformity of population).
Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 993 F. Supp. 2d, 1094 (D. Ariz. 2014)
By: Stephanie Wilmes
As of 2013, thirteen states used nonpartisan judicial elections to select their state Supreme Court justice, and eighteen states used nonpartisan elections to select trial court judges at all levels. On March 25, 2015, West Virginia joined their number when Governor Earl Ray Tomblin signed HB 2010 into law.
[Read more…] about West Virginia Moves to Nonpartisan Judicial Elections in 2016