13 November 2018 — 1519 mst
Legislature’s website, Florida, and the Green Party’s brief
The Montana Legislature’s website is undergoing maintenance in broad daylight, which means many links are not available. I suspect the webmasters are preparing for tomorrow, when the political parties choose their leaders for the 2019 session. One link that was unavailable when I began writing this post: requests for drafts of bills. Website maintenance should be performed from midnight Friday to 0500 on Saturday.
Florida
Three elections in Florida are being recounted: U.S. Senator, Governor, and Agriculture Commissioner. Expressed as percentages, the elections are very close, but the candidates are thousands of votes apart. Unless a systemic error that flips or discovers thousands of votes is discovered, I suspect Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis will prevail. Recounts seldom change the outcome of elections.
President Trump and Gov. Scott, and their sycophants, unconstrained by a belief that accusations must be backed by evidence, are making reckless and dangerous charges of voter fraud. They were rebuked by a Florida judge, who urged them to “ramp down the rhetoric.” Trump wants to stop counting provision and military ballots, and to declare Scott and DeSantis the winners based on the vote totals released on election night. That’s how elections are conducted in banana republics.
In the quasi-banana republic of Broward County, where, to quote Tallyrand, they’ve forgotten nothing and learned nothing, it’s 2000 all over again. At Slate, Rich Hasen, who writes the Election Law Blog, notes that in Broward the problem is incompetence, not fraud, but the result may be as unjust as fraud. And he warns that a similar situation in 2020 could be worse than today’s debacle.
Green Party challenges Montana's ballot access laws
Everyone needs to read the Montana Green Party’s brief challenging Montana’s distribution requirements for statewide petitions. At the Ballot Access News, Richard Winger observes:
Courts have been unanimous (except for one peculiar Utah decision from 1972) that distribution requirements for statewide petitions are unconstitutional, if the distribution requirement gives the voters of some geographical areas more power than it gives the voters of other areas. Generally an unconstitutional distribution requirement offends one person, one vote, if the number of signatures required inside each area is the same, but the population of the areas varies.
Montana’s distribution requirement, unique in the history of state ballot access laws, is the opposite. The areas have equal populations, but the required number of signatures inside each area varies widely. Montana requires signatures inside at least 34 state house districts to equal 5% of the winning candidate for Governor’s vote inside that district. That requirement varies hugely, from 55 signatures, to 150 signatures. So the voters of the districts with only 55 signatures have more power to get a party on, than the voters in the districts that require 150 signatures.
Whether the Montana Greens have a winning argument remains to be determined, but they do have a serious argument. If they prevail in court and receive the relief they request, they’re more likely to collect enough signatures to obtain a place on the ballot. That thought both chills and infuriates the Montana Democratic Party, which will undoubtedly continue to employ every legal and political trick to keep the MGP off the ballot.
If Montana adopted Instant Runoff (ranked choice) elections, third parties could compete in the political marketplace for votes without, in most cases, threatening the major two parties. Maine just conducted an election with ranked choice voting (which is being challenged in court by a Republican candidate for Congress). For more information on ranked choice voting, go to Fair Vote.