The Ballot Bulletin: December 2017

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In The Ballot Bulletin, Ballotpedia tracks developments in election policy at the federal, state, and local levels. To shed light on these developments, each issue will include an in-depth feature, such as an interview or event timeline. We will also discuss recent prominent events relating to electoral and primary systems, redistricting, and voter provisions.

This month's edition: This month, we'll bring you up-to-speed on recent developments surrounding the implementation of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We'll also get you caught up on the status of state legislative redistricting in North Carolina. Finally, we'll spotlight petition signature requirements for independent candidates for the U.S. Senate in 2018.

Santa Fe City Council votes both to proceed with ranked-choice voting in municipal elections and to appeal court order requiring implementation

See also: Electoral systems in New Mexico

• What's the story? On December 4, 2017, the Santa Fe City Council voted unanimously to use ranked-choice voting in the city's March 2018 municipal elections, complying with a court order issued by a state judge in late November. The council also voted 5-4 to appeal that order to the state supreme court. The city's appeal pivots on two questions: whether the state judge who issued the implementation order acted outside his authority, and whether ranked-choice voting is in compliance with the state constitution. The court order, and the city council's December 4 votes, resulted from a lawsuit filed by RCV proponents in August 2017. The plaintiffs in the suit argued that Santa Fe's voting equipment met the requirements set forth in the charter amendment and that RCV software had been offered to the city at no cost by New Mexico's secretary of state. City officials countered that the prerequisites for implementation had not yet been met.
• What brought us here?
  • March 4, 2008: Voters approved Amendment #5, which provided for the implementation of RCV "commencing with the regular municipal election in March 2010 or as soon thereafter when equipment and software for tabulating the votes and allowing correction of incorrectly marked, in-person ballots are available at a reasonable price." The margin of victory was 65 percent to 35 percent.
  • March 2010 to July 2017: The target implementation date specified in the charter amendment (March 10, 2010) was not met, nor was RCV implemented in any succeeding elections through 2017. During this period, elections were decided via plurality vote.
  • July 26, 2017: The Santa Fe City Council voted 6 to 3 to not implement RCV in Santa Fe's 2018 municipal elections.
  • August 30, 2017: Maria Perez, director of FairVote New Mexico, and Santa Fe residents Craig O’Hare, Ellen Ackerman, and Anne Noss filed suit in the New Mexico Supreme Court against the Santa Fe City Council and mayor, requesting that the court order city officials to implement RCV beginning with the 2018 municipal election cycle.
  • September 21, 2017: A three-justice panel of the state supreme court voted unanimously to reject the plaintiffs' request. The plaintiffs refiled their suit on September 29, 2017.
  • November 9, 2017: Judge David Thomson, of the First Judicial District Court in New Mexico, ordered city officials "to implement the ranked-choice system or show why it should not have to do so at a hearing scheduled for Nov. 21."
  • November 29, 2017: Thomson ordered Santa Fe city officials to implement ranked-choice voting (RCV) for the city's 2018 municipal election cycle.
• What are the reactions and what comes next? Santa Fe will prepare to use RCV in the city's March 2018 municipal elections. Because the city council also voted to appeal the implementation order, it is possible that the state supreme court may intervene and reverse it. City Councilor Joseph Maestas, who voted against appealing the order to the state supreme court, said, "Each individual track [i.e., pursuing both implementation and appeal simultaneously] is in conflict with the other. I'm concerned about injecting confusion into the minds of the voters." Ron Trujillo, who voted in favor of appealing, said that it was necessary to address the constitutionality of RCV: "Once we get a definitive answer on this, then we don't ever have to worry about it again."
  • Ballotpedia spoke with Steve Fresquez, the chief deputy of the elections bureau of the Santa Fe County Clerk's Office, and Drew Penrose, the legal and policy director at FairVote, to get their takes on the practical questions of implementation of RCV in Santa Fe.
  • BP: What needs to happen in order for RCV to be implemented? What kinds of equipment and training are required?
  • Steve Fresquez: The training that we're going to be getting is how to run the tests to certify the equipment to make sure that [the equipment is] reading correctly. We do that before we send the machines out for any election. They have to be certified by the city clerk or the county clerk, in the event that it's our election. But in this case it will be a municipal election, so the municipal clerk will be overseeing the certification. They're going to have to train them on procedures. As far as voting, the voting should work the same, as far as identifying voters that are qualified. It's my understanding that the municipal clerk will be doing a voter education campaign. I know in a previous election they sent out flyers to every voter that was eligible to describe what the election was, so I'm sure that they'll be doing some kind of advertising and possibly a mail-out. But I think they're still going over their options since it was only verified [on November 29] that they would have to do ranked-choice voting in the court decision.
  • Drew Penrose: Implementing RCV is straightforward, as proven by the track record of other jurisdictions implementing in very short time periods. For example, North Carolina implemented RCV for a statewide election in 2011 in just 86 days. It did not have equipment designed to run RCV elections, it did not have any precedents of other states recently conducting statewide RCV elections, and it did not receive any additional funding to do so. Nonetheless, it successfully conducted an RCV election in that timeline. According to Caleb Kleppner, an expert who has assisted with implementation in several cities with RCV, Santa Fe “will have the easiest path to run a successful first use of ranked-choice voting in history.” The voting system Santa Fe will use in its March, 2018 elections has RCV already built-in, certified by the state, and ready to go. Santa Fe also has the benefit of free access to consultation from and to a model implementation plan designed and published by the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, a group of former election officials with direct experience conducting ranked choice voting elections.
  • BP: In your view, is Santa Fe prepared for implementation of RCV? If not, what needs to happen?
  • Fresquez: They did upgrade all the equipment, and we're going to be doing testing prior to the election. From my understanding, they're going to be using the same type of equipment they've used in California and other states that have selected areas for ranked-choice voting. But I can't really answer that until I see it myself and see that it does work correctly. … The thing I'm wondering about is if it's going to be acceptable to the voters once they find out how it works. I'm not really sure. From most of the people that have asked me, they aren't really aware of how it works and whether it will be beneficial to Santa Fe or not. I guess that's what I'm looking for at the end, to see whether the city accepts it as something they want to use in the future. I guess we're going to find all that out real soon. But I'm optimistic.
  • Penrose: Absolutely. Because Santa Fe is already intending to use federally tested, RCV-ready voting equipment, implementation will be more straightforward than it has been in other jurisdictions, and can easily fit into the time before the next election. Dominion, who provides the voting system Santa Fe will use, can provide the necessary training for election administrators, and assist with ballot design. Voter education is most critically provided by candidate campaigns, civic groups, and effective ballot design.The model implementation plan mentioned above, which the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center will provide at no cost, includes sample ballot designs – including a mock-up based on prior ballot designs in Santa Fe – and voter education materials that the city can begin publishing promptly. Santa Fe is ready to implement RCV and finally give its voters the stronger voice in elections that they voted for nearly a decade ago.
• What's going on in the rest of the country? The map below identifies states in which electoral systems or primary systems legislation has been introduced in 2017. A darker shade of red indicates a greater number of relevant bills. For full details about electoral systems legislation, see this article. For full details about primary systems legislation, see this article.

Electoral systems legislation as of December 1, 2017

Primary systems legislation as of December 1, 2017

Court-appointed special master issues final recommendations for revised state legislative district maps in North Carolina

See also: Redistricting in North Carolina

• What's the story? On December 1, Nate Persily, the special master appointed to assist the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina in evaluating North Carolina's state legislative district plans, issued his final recommendations for revising those plans. Persily said that his recommendations "represent a limited response to a select number of districts that require alteration to comply with the law."
• How did we get here? On October 26, 2017, the district court issued an order appointing Persily as a special master "to assist the Court in further evaluating and, if necessary, redrawing" state legislative district maps enacted by the General Assembly of North Carolina on August 31, 2017, as the result of a federal court order. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed a district court decision finding that 28 state legislative districts had been subject to an illegal racial gerrymander. The district court then ordered state lawmakers to draft remedial maps for use in the 2018 election cycle. These maps are the ones to which Persily's recommendations apply.
  • A special master is an individual appointed by a court to carry out some action on the court's behalf. Nate Persily is a law professor at Stanford University.
  • Rep. David Lewis (R) and Sen. Ralph Hise (R), the chairmen of their chambers' respective redistricting committees, issued a statement criticizing Persily's recommendations: "By making many changes Democrats demanded, Mr. Persily has confirmed our worst suspicions: this entire ‘judicial process’ is little more than a thinly-veiled political operation where unelected judges, legislating from the bench, strip North Carolinians of their constitutional right to self-governance by appointing a left-wing California professor to draw districts handing Democrats control of legislative seats they couldn’t win at the ballot box."
  • Wayne Goodwin, North Carolina Democratic Party (NCDP) chairman, defended Persily's recommendations: "The independent, non-partisan special master had one task – to fix Republicans’ unconstitutional racial gerrymander after Speaker Moore and Leader Berger refused. NCDP applauds the special master for doing just that, and for giving voters in the affected districts a chance to pick their representatives again instead of the other way around. Republicans made this bed and now they must lie in it, and their efforts to delegitimize the special master and our judicial system are dangerous and destructive."
  • The district court panel overseeing the case scheduled a hearing for January 5, 2018, to discuss Persily's recommendations. According to the Winston-Salem Journal, the panel could "adopt [Persily's plan] in full, make changes, or reject it entirely."
  • The candidate filing period in North Carolina is scheduled to end on February 28, 2018. All 50 Senate seats and all 120 House seats will be up for election in North Carolina in 2018. Currently, the GOP holds veto-proof supermajorities in both the House and Senate. In order to break these supermajorities, Democrats would need to pick up four seats in the House and six in the Senate.
• What's going on in the rest of the country? The map below identifies states in which redistricting legislation has been introduced in 2017. A darker shade of red indicates a greater number of relevant bills. For full details about redistricting legislation, see this article.

Redistricting legislation as of December 1, 2017

How many signatures will independent U.S. Senate candidates need to collect in 2018 in order to make the ballot?

See also: Petition signature requirements for independent U.S. Senate candidates, 2018

• Normally, this newsletter focuses on electoral policy from the voter's perspective. This month, in advance of the 2018 midterm elections, we wanted to take a moment to focus on election policy as it applies to candidates. Ballotpedia provides extensive coverage of ballot access laws in the U.S. These laws determine which candidates and political parties are able to have their names printed on election ballots. These laws are adopted and enforced at the state level. This month, we're going to look at ballot access requirements for independent U.S. Senate candidates
• In 2018, 33 U.S. Senate seats will be up for election. An independent candidate (i.e., a candidate who does not affiliated with a ballot-qualified political party) is generally required to submit petition signatures in order to have his or her name printed on the ballot in November (although some states permit an independent candidate to pay a filing fee instead of filing petitions, all states provide for independent candidates to obtain ballot placement by collecting signatures). These signature requirements vary from state to state.
• Ballotpedia collected these signature requirements and calculated them as percentages of state populations in order to facilitate comparisons between the states. We found that Hawaii and Tennessee, which both require independent U.S. candidates to submit 25 petition signatures, require fewer signatures than any other state. This is true both when the figures are viewed as raw numbers and when expressed as percentages of state population (in each case, the 25-signature requirement represents less than 0.01 percent of the state population). Montana is expected to require independent candidates for U.S. Senate to submit 11,807 signatures, which represents 1.13 percent of the state population, a higher ratio than any other state.

See also

• Election policy on Ballotpedia
• Electoral systems legislation at the state and city levels in the United States, 2017
• Primary systems legislation at the state and city levels in the United States, 2017
• Redistricting legislation at the state and city levels in the United States, 2017
• Federal redistricting legislation in the United States, 2017-2019 (115th Congress)