On August 5, 2008, Howard Lydick died. He had been nominated for vice-president at the 2007 Prohibition Party national convention held by the Earl Dodge faction of that party. Lydick lived in Richardson, Texas, and had also been the 2004 vice-presidential nominee of the Earl Dodge faction of the Prohibition Party.
Earl Dodge, the presidential candidate of his faction of the Prohibition Party for 2008, had also died, in November 2007. After Dodge died, Lydick had quietly worked to heal the breach between the two factions of the Prohibition Party. His death in August 2008 was not a complete surprise, since he had been seriously ill for several weeks before his death.
Richard, after Earl Dodge’s death did his faction
attempt to qualify on any state ballots for President?
If so, how successful were they? If not than can we
assume that Amondson’s group will probably not qualify
on anymore states than what they already have today.
After Earl’s death, Earl’s faction did not wish to try to qualify a new presidential candidate, and started talking to the other faction. There was going to be a compromise Amondson-Lydick ticket, although Leroy Pletten still wanted to be the v-p candidate with Amondson. So the ticket filed in at least one state was Amondson-Lydick but in other states it was going to be Amondson-Pletten. Now all states will have Amondson-Pletten.
What was the big rift over?
Nothing ideological. Dodge was just a dick who thought he owned the party and she keep being the presidential nominee even though he was only getting like 300 votes.
Contrary to the article’s claim that Dodge-Lydick were part of the historic (since 1869) Prohibition Party, they were not. It is a matter of well-established public record that in mid 2003, Earl Dodge, his attorney Howard Lydick, and their eight supporters seceded from the historic Party. Messrs. Dodge and Lydick formally established a new competing Party on 5 Sept. 2003. They entitled it the “National Prohibition Party.†They checked the “NO†box concerning member voting.
The suspicion of one of the above commenters is correct. There were no ideological differences. Earl Dodge indeed wanted to be Party leader for life, and to have sole control of Party funds. The document that Dodge-Lydick formally filed to Colorado to set up the competing party is document number 20031285653. It is available via the Colorado website, http://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/BusinessEntityCriteriaExt.do
Messrs. Dodge and Lydick then caused a lawsuit wherein they demanded recognition for their new Party as the ONLY Prohibition Party. They sought to cut off the histroic Party’s primary funding source set up in the 1920’s for the historic Party. Dodge-Lydick sought to have those funds declared to belong to the new competing Party! The historic Party naturally objected! The Court ordered both Parties to formally state their membership numbers. The 1869 Party showed 36 members, while the Dodge-Lydick Party showed 8 members and themselves. (It is not known whether any of the eight people named by Dodge-Lydick were aware of having been named.) Again, this is all a matter of public record on file in the litigation.
After Mr. Dodge’s death, Mr. Lydick opposed reconciliation of the two Parties, opposed healing the breach, and went so far as to cut off contact with, and refuse to deal with, the correspondence officer of the historic Party. He refused to put anything in writing for healing the breach.
Contrary to the article, Messrs. Dodge and Lydick were NOT the candidates of the historic Party in either 2004 nor 2008. They were NOT nominated by it. If they ran at all, they did so under the auspices of their new Party. At their “conventions,” they had only a fraction of their membership. And they received essentially no votes, and refused to ever publish in their newsletter, their dismal showing.
Anyone can check the Colorado website, http://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/BusinessEntityCriteriaExt.do search for Document 20031285653, and see that it remains in existence as a competing Party. Of course, with the death of its founders, it may soon wither away, as its purported eight other members are not known to even be aware of their purported membership. Nothing in the public record indicates any such awareness. It may well have been a “party” of two only.
It is understood that their 2007 “convention” consisted of themselves (Dodge and Lydick), and Vice-Chairman Paul Scott — not a member meeting. In essence, Dodge and Lydick nominated themselves! Dodge and Lydick, of course, being deceased, will not be on the ballot in any state.
The historic Party never recognized those competing Party’s nominations, in neither 2004 nor 2008, and proceeded with their own Conventions with substantially higher attendance (in 2007 reaching near 100% attendance, i.e., 10 times that of the Dodge-Lydick Party), and nominated their own candidates. Those candidates of the historic Party are in fact on the ballot in various states.