On November 7, eight Libertarian nominees were elected to township offices in partisan elections in Pennsylvania. The Libertarian Party web page has the list. Also, around the nation, in non-partisan elections four Libertarian Party members were elected to various local offices.
Were any of these wins the result of the other parties failing to field candidates?
To answer the question above, I looked on the various Pennsylvania county election websites where Libertarians won. Many of them were running unopposed. However, being familiar with Pennsylvania politics having grown up there, I can say that PA has a ton of elected positions at the local level, so much so that many of them lacked ANY candidate, and many were running unopposed.
I hope the PA Libertarian party recognizes this, and uses this as an opportunity to build the LP numbers of elected officials. There is some low-hanging fruit there, IMO, to pad the numbers of elected Libertarians. The LP can still brag about increasing its numbers, as I suspect nationally not many people will inquire about how they got elected, rather than just the fact that they got elected.
8 candidates were elected to 9 offices. Jake Towne was elected to two. And LP.org left out Andy LeCureaux, of Hazel Park, Michigan city council in one of its lists, although he is included elsewhere on the site.
So, 13 Libertarians were elected to 14 offices in November, assuming LP.org didn’t leave out anyone else. And they list 19 that were elected earlier in 2017, so they’re up to 33 for the year.
The pluralistic nature of the Libertarian Party from top to bottom will cement their role as insignificant in politics because of the divisive nature of their tactics for at least another twenty years.
The only way to win in today’s scheme is to use unifying voting system and to work towards uniting the 100% under pure proportional representation like the 10th USA Parliament has been doing for twenty-two consecutive years.
http://www.international-parliament.org/ucc.html