The drought that has been plaguing vast areas of the nation this summer has intensified dramatically over the past week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
This election, an estimated five million eligible voters will be disenfranchised from the political process due to new voter identification laws.
The situation in Georgia is so bad that state officials have asked its prison population to pick a vast crop of onions. The ensuing farm labor shortage begs an important question: in a nation with so many jobless claims, why are there so many unfilled jobs?
The California Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s ruling denying a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Proposition 14 in Field v. Bowen, one of the pending lawsuits against the top-two open primary system.
Republicans are worried that the new legislative district maps that have been drawn up by the Citizens Redistricting Commission favor the Democratic party. In conjunction with the top-two open primary, however, in some districts they may also favor an Independent candidate.
Political insiders all over California are scrambling to make sense of how the state’s newly-drawn legislative districts might affect next year’s elections. Any such calculations are made all the more difficult by virtue of the fact that next year’s elections will also be held under the state’s new top-two open primary system.
A little-known provision of the law implementing California’s top-two open primary system banned the counting of write-in votes on general election ballots. The State Senate is now considering legislation that would prohibit write-in candidates and write-in voting at the general election for voter-nominated offices. The write-in ban is currently being challenged in court.
