Are our American bretheren reliving 2000 even before the next biennial
election?     Perhaps the newspapers were a tad guilty of mistaking
geographical coincidence with lightning-calling-twice with the Floridian
balloting problems.   But the NJ litigation should surely only be heard on
Groundhog Day.  Will it settle into a bunfight about activist courts and
the jurisdictional limits of state courts keeping democratic options open
in the face of mysterious injunctions about the legislature's power to
magically write self-explanatory electoral rules?

Is it too provocative (I'm sure it is constitutionally outrageous) to
suggest that if the US system were serious about minimising the space for
judicial interpretation of electoral rules, the first thing to do is (by
hook, crook, financial sticks or fed/state pact) to establish a single,
completely non-partisan, national authority to run all aspects of federal
elections.

Graeme Orr
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia