The Death of the Mind

As already noted, last year the Ninth Circuit struck down the Montana distribution requirement for petitions to create a qualified party. The Montana legislature is not scheduled to meet during calendar year 2022, so there is no likelihood that the legislature can restore the distribution requirement until 2023 at the earliest. Presumably if the legislature restores it, it will require an equal number of signatures from legislative districts, avoiding the constitutional problem.
Therefore, for 2022, the petition to qualify a new party will be easier than it has been since 1969. The petition still needs 5,000 signatures, but signatures can be gathered anywhere in the state. However, the petition deadline is in late February.
Before 1969, Montana allowed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/01/22/during-2022-montana-party-petition-will-not-require-any-distribution-requirement/

Ranked choice voting (RCV) improves representation, increases participation, and improves our democracy. Some may have you believe that RCV is a tool for helping one party over another; however, recent legislation and elections prove that ranked choice voting is a cross-partisan reform with support on both sides of the aisle.
In 2019, New York City voted to amend their charter to implement RCV in primaries and special elections. FairVote Action Board Member Andrew Yang, a long-time supporter of RCV and founder of the Forward Party, tweeted, “Ranked choice voting would let us express our true preferences and make our politics more dynamic and responsive. We should make it the norm throughout the country.” Fast forward to 2021,…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/americans_of_all_parties_love_rcv

Vice News has some really great reporters on tech issues who work for its Motherboard publication. For reasons that don’t make sense, last week they had some other reporter write an absolutely ridiculously bad story trying to argue that the “stop the steal” idiots were helped along by the amazingly important work done by folks in the famed “Voting Village” at the DEFCON conference. The full article is long and bad and has the ridiculous and misleading title: How an “Ethical” Hacker Convention Is Fueling Trump’s Big Lie. But the very premise of this story is not just wrong, but dangerously stupid. It’s shameful that anyone at Vice thought this was an appropriate story to publish.

The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220115/01065948289/vice-publishes-bullshit-nonsense-article-blaming-defcon-voting-village-stop-steal-idiots.shtml