CCD joins lawsuit filed on behalf of write-in candidates and voters in Washington, D.C., to require elections officials to report vote totals for each qualified write-in candidate. Currently, D.C. only includes the total number of all write-in votes in its official vote tally, effectively disenfranchising write-in voters. The case is Libertarian Party, et al. v. District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, Civ. No. 09-5836.

CCD Director Theresa Amato will join a panel discussion at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., about George Mason University Professor of Economics James Bennett’s book Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold. Amato’s book, Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny, was published by New Press in June 2009. Professor Bennett will also be joined by former Federal Election Commission member Hans A. von Sp

CCD submits comments to Maine Legislature’s Joint Committee on Legal and Veteran Affairs, urging adoption of safeguards to protect candidates’ rights in proposed legislation regulating circulation of minor party and independent candidates’ nomination petitions. The proposed legislation would require petition circulators to swear that they “personally witnessed” the signing of each signature on a petition – an unnecessarily strict standard that invites unfounded but irrefutable allegations of fra

CCD joins Emergency Application for a Stay of Enforcement, submitted to the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Herbert J. Hoffman, independent candidate for United States Senate in Maine’s 2008 general election. On July 28, 2008, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine denied Hoffman listing on Maine’s ballot, even though all parties conceded that he had submitted a petition with enough valid signatures, because he could not prove that three particular signatures had been signed in his “presen

CCD submits amicus brief to United States Supreme Court in support of Petition for Certiorari filed on behalf of Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties of Pennsylvania in Rogers v. Cortes. The Petitioners challenge the Third Circuit’s decision inRogers, which upheld Pennsylvania’s requirement that they submit nomination petitions with signatures equal in number to two percent of the vote cast for any winning candidate for statewide office in the previous election. CCD’s amicus brief argues