The Wyoming Secretary of State expects to be finished checking Jill Stein’s independent presidential petition by the end of the day, Tuesday, September 4. If the petition succeeds, that will be the first time the Green Party presidential nominee has ever appeared on the Wyoming ballot. Ralph Nader did not qualify in 2000 in Wyoming.
Kentucky has four independent candidates for U.S. House this year. That is the largest number of independent U.S. House candidates who have ever appeared on government-printed ballots in Kentucky, ever since the state started using government-printed ballots in 1892. This year there is an independent candidate on the ballot in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th districts. Kentucky has six districts.
Two of the independent candidates do not live in Kentucky. David Lewis, running in the 4th district, lives in Ohio and ran in the Republican primary in 2012 against the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. Andrew Beacham, running in the 2nd district, lives in Indiana. Here is an article about them. They are both supporters of Randall Terry. The U.S. Constitution, Article One, has no residency requirement for anyone to run for Congress except that the candidate live in the state on election day.
No independent candidate had been elected to the Kentucky legislature since 1923, but then in 2006 an independent, Bob Leeper, was elected to the State Senate, and he was re-elected as an independent in 2010. Independent candidates in Kentucky are injured by the state’s use of a party-column device, but Leeper was able to overcome that problem.
Kentucky only has one minor party candidate on the ballot for U.S. House this year, Libertarian Craig R. Astor in the 2nd district.
Randall Terry, anti-legal abortion activist, is running as an independent candidate for President. He is already on the ballot in his home state, West Virginia, and is petitioning in Kentucky and Nebraska.
He is also on the ballot as an independent candidate for U.S. House in Florida’s 20th district. He is the only ballot-listed opponent to Democratic incumbent Alcee Hastings. The U.S. Constitution has no residency requirement for candidates for Congress, other than that they live in the state they hope to represent on election day.
Earlier this year, Terry ran in Democratic presidential primaries in Missouri, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. He was a Right to Life Party nominee for U.S. House in New York in 1998, polling 6.94% in a race with both a Democrat and a Republican also running. Also, Terry ran for Florida State Senate in the Republican primary in 2006.
This year, two independent candidates for Congress in Kentucky, Andrew Beacham in the 2nd district and David Lewis in the 4th district, are supporters of Terry.
Here is a link to the wiki page about Terry.
This year, the only two candidates on the Georgia ballot for one of the statewide Public Service Commission races are incumbent Stan Wise, a Republican, and David A. Staples, the Libertarian nominee. This is a partisan race.
Georgia Libertarians also had a nominee in a two-way race for the same office in 2008. That Libertarian, John Monds, polled 1,076,760 votes (33.4%), and carried four counties, including Fulton and DeKalb, two very populous counties.
Staples’ campaign web page is www.votestaples.com.
Florida will have twelve presidential candidates this year. By comparision, in 2000 there were ten; in 2004 there were eight; and in 2008 there were thirteen.
The twelve in 2008 are the nominees of the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Justice, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Peace & Freedom, America’s Independent, Socialist, Objectivist, and Reform Parties. These parties are listed in the order of how many states their presidential nominees are on the ballot (so far). UPDATE: an earlier version of this post said the Socialist Workers Party is on and that the Reform Party is not, but the post has been corrected.
Probably Florida will have more presidential candidates on its ballot than any other state except Colorado, although Louisiana might also have more but that is not yet determined. None of the other 47 states will have more than ten.
Four parties that placed presidential candidates on the ballot in Florida in 2008 did not do so in 2012. They are the Prohibition, Boston Tea, Socialist Workers, and Ecology Parties.
