Indiana Republican Party County Chair Tries to Remove Libertarian Slate from November 2015 Ballot for Anderson City Office

Indiana cities elect officers in partisan elections on November 3, 2015. In Anderson, the Republican Party county chair has filed a challenge to the Libertarian slate. The challenge says the Libertarian Party didn’t have a valid nominating convention. See this story.

The Libertarian Party in Indiana nominates all its candidates by convention. The state law says primaries are reserved for qualified parties that polled 10% in the last election for Secretary of State.

In 2004, Ralph Nader was nominated for President by the Reform Party in a national convention conducted by conference call. Nader’s ballot position as the Reform Party nominee in Florida was then challenged in state court on the grounds that a national convention must be an in-person meeting. But the State Supreme Court rejected the challenge and Nader appeared on the Florida ballot as the Reform Party nominee.


Comments

Indiana Republican Party County Chair Tries to Remove Libertarian Slate from November 2015 Ballot for Anderson City Office — 11 Comments

  1. It is not clear what happened. The story claims that the state chair has to certify vacancies, but it appears that it is the county party is in charge of nominations for local office (why it is not the city party is strange).

    There is nothing to indicate that the county libertarian party conducted a convention, whether by phone or in a phone booth, or in a timely fashion.

    Can there be a vacancy in nomination if no one was nominated in the first place.

    Top 2 is the solution.

  2. Top Two is not the solution. I would like to see my views represented in the general election. Under top two i could see two Democrats running against each other. I suppose that if we just ban Republicans from the ballot that would solve the problem. But ranked voting may be a better option and allowing all candidates the chance to be heard in the general election.

  3. I like Top Two. But the general psychology of participants on both sides in the story are for division and conflict. The word unity doesn’t mean anything to these poor souls.

    The 9th USA Parliament has been united for twenty consecutive year and we are able to find the unity everyone needs and there is plenty of it but since no one is interested in the math they are stuck in division and hostility.

    The USA and International Parliaments use it and it works fine:
    http://www.usparliament.org/v-h-ss11-6.php

  4. Politics is all about division.

    The “politics of unity: is the watchword of authoritarian and totalitarian societies.

  5. Progress in political *science* since the DARK AGE.
    NO party hack primaries, caucuses and conventions.
    Nominations ONLY by nominating petitions.
    P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.

  6. @David But under the partisan nomination system, you are dependent on someone from your point-of-view clan being “nominated”.

    The story is about the mayor and city council in Anderson, Indiana, a city of 55,000. What is being determined is who should be mayor or serve on the council.

    If you lived in Anderson, and it had Top 2, you could run for mayor or city council. Or you could urge someone you know to run. Or you could get together with your civic club or ideology cult to support a particular candidate.

    On election day, you would be confronted with a ballot that asks:

    “Whom do you want to be mayor?”

    “Whom do you want to be on the city council (choose up to 3)?

    “Whom do you want to be the city council member for your district”?

    Why add unneeded complexity?

  7. Jim – I think you have a different version of Top Two. There are cases where voters will choose a total number of candidates as a group with the top number getting elected. The office for Mayor can’t do that so we need to be able to vote for the the person who best reflects our views in the general election. If voters don’t have choices they won’t vote. In California, the Top Two Primary has caused general election turnout to become pretty low number wise.

  8. @David Where Top 2 primaries are used with multi-member positions, two times the number to be elected advance to the general election. Anderson elects 3 city council members at large, without no positions. So under a Top 2 system, the six top vote-getters would advance to the general election.

    You confuse correlation with causality. Top 2 did not cause low turnout in California, just as it did not cause high turnout in Washington, even though there was a high turnout election in Washington under the Top 2 reform, and a low turnout election in California in 2014.

  9. Washington state turnout dropped in 2008, the very first year it was used. The Washington Secretary of State at the time, who supported top-two, had predicted that turnout would go up. He was very surprised when it went down.

    Later turnout in Washington state went up because the state started mailing a ballot to every voter, and that always makes turnout go up when it is done.

    California turnout didn’t just go down in 2014. California turnout dropped between Nov. 2010 and Nov. 2014 more than any other state. California is the only state in which the turnout rate in Nov. 2014 was less than 70% of the Nov. 2010 turnout. In November 2010 California voters had six parties to choose from, but in November 2014 California voters were the only voters in the nation who were forced to either vote for a Rep or a Dem for all statewide offices, or not vote at all.

  10. Turnout in Washington in 2008 was 84.61%. Turnout in 2004 was 82.23%. That /is/ an increase.

    What you may be comparing is the turnout for the infamous pick-a-party primary of 2004 vs. the Top 2 Reform primary of 2008.

    That claim has been thoroughly debunked. First, only 88% of the persons who cast a vote in primary, successfully voted for a gubernatorial candidate in 2004. That is because they were denied the opportunity to vote for their candidate of choice. Voters may have refused to vote, or they have picked a party and didn’t realize that it was legally forbidden to vote for a candidate of a different party, and that any such vote would be discarded as invalid.

    Second, Ron Sims, the popular county executive for King County was running for the Democratic nomination for governor. This increased turnout in the Seattle area. If you compare turnout for 2004 vs. 2008, you will see that it decreased around Seattle, and increased the further you went away.

    A portrait of Sam Reed should replace that of George Washington on the state flag.

  11. The worst part of the Anderson situation is they will not even allow the voter to write in any of these candidates. As a voter I should have the right to write in whomever I choose.

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