Arizona Releases Write-in Results from August 28 Primaries; Results Show Extreme Injustice Toward Libertarian Party

On September 11, the Arizona Secretary of State released the official tally of votes from the August 28 primaries. This is the first knowledge anyone has had of the write-ins in the primaries. Four parties held primaries: Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Green. Neither of the last two parties had any candidates’ names printed on their primary ballots for any federal or state office. Instead, these parties attempted to nominate via write-ins in the primaries.

Arizona law on the minimum number of write-ins is highly discriminatory. If a party has earned qualified status at either this election, or the preceding election, then it can nominate with just one write-in vote, assuming the write-in candidate has no opponent in the primary. But if the party has been continuously qualified for five years or more previously, then it must have thousands of write-ins to nominate for statewide office, and hundreds to nominate for district office.

Thus, the Green Party was permitted to nominate for U.S. Senate. Its sole candidate for that office, Angela Green, received 389 write-ins. But the sole Libertarian write-in candidate in the Libertarian primary for U.S. Senate, Adam Kokesh, was not deemed nominated, even though he polled 2,159 write-ins. Similar results occurred for other offices as well. See the results here. Thanks to Richard Grayson for the link.

A Libertarian Party lawsuit against the Arizona primary ballot access laws for continuously qualified minor parties is pending in the Ninth Circuit. All the briefs have been submitted, but there is no date yet for the oral argument. The U.S. District Court had upheld the law.


Comments

Arizona Releases Write-in Results from August 28 Primaries; Results Show Extreme Injustice Toward Libertarian Party — 8 Comments

  1. Again —

    ANY State having EQUAL ballot access laws for ALL candidates for a partisan office

    — NOT including top 2 primary States ???

    IE — ALL States with separate and unequal ballot access laws for partisan offices ???

    Little wonder of ALL of the zillion UNEQUAL laws in ALL States

    — due to ALL of the gerrymander OLIGARCHS

    — rich/poor, locality, sex, etc.
    — aka special interest gangster laws.

  2. The Libertarian Party didn’t want to hear about the equalising effects if pure proportional representation (PPR) in 2012.

    The United Coalition won the only state primary, the state if Missouri, which fell before their national convention with 52.7% of the votes despite being de-libked from their national web site, deleted from posting on BAN, Independent Political Report and from scores of Libertarian facebook pages in their censorship campaign against the United Coalition.

    The United Coalition in 2012 was bringing a team of Presidential candidates, some of who were asking the voters to consider their opposite gender ahead of their own under the unifying PPR voting system.

    Now the United Coalition USA is again participating in the national drive to bring pure proportional representation to not just the political arena but the business community as well.

    By looking at bringing advanced democracy to the laws of both politics and business our team is on the cutting edges of voting reform.

    It’s our pleasure to welcome new participation to the team that welcomes and protects free speech liberties with confidence for more than twenty-three consecutive years.

    http://www.allpartysystem.com

  3. There actually were three Green Party candidates who submitted enough valid signatures to be listed on the primary ballot: one for Congress (AZ-04) and two for state representative. All the other Greens who won the primary were write-in candidates.

    What I told Arizona Libertarians to do was to go through the tedious and expensive process of starting a new party and getting it onto the ballot for this election. For good reasons, they didn’t consider that. But if they had, giving it a different name (presumably it would have to be distinctive enough not to be that close to “Libertarian” and then, as a party without continuous ballot access, their write-in candidates could have won with a simple plurality of the primary vote (even a single vote).

    Arizona Libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates because only a Democratic governor and legislature will restore their ballot access absent a favorable federal court ruling. As a Green Party candidate for the legislature (having won my primary with a 2-vote landslide: thanks, Cousin Bette!), I certainly favor a ballot access law that would bring back the Libertarian Party.

  4. Richard, congratulations on your recent victory, we hope the trend continues for you through November.

    Meanwhile, if you want to build on your offer to coordinate with the AZ Libertarian Party, don’t bother, pluralist laws do not encourage good cooperation across party lines.

    But now the United Coalition USA is changing all that and it’s offering you an opportunity to unite with us men behind our opposite gender under one large national district.

    The Green/Libertarian team Barr/Ogle is continuing as the Libertarian/Green Unity Herd/Ogle ticket in 2020 since I have switched by to the Green Party of California now that they adopted the same pure proportional representation (PPR) that I was advocating in 1994 as a Green Party candidate for Governor of California.

    Try to join our team if you want to work with all parties and independents as one team under the parliamentary procedures of PPR.

    Mark Herd [Libertarian] for President 2020 is the only person who I know of that is working with the team looking for equal treatment and equal time as long as our opposite gender is ahead of ours with consecutively ranked alternating genders thereafter.
    He is currently serving as CA State LP Exec and is bringing to correct voting system to the Los Angeles Libertarians and with me in Los Angeles too, a Green Party POTUS candidate myself. We want to expand on the unity in AZ somehow:

    http://www.usparliament.org/google2020.php

  5. Regarding Me’s questions…

    In 1994 I switched from Environmentalist Party to the Green Party, after Kevin Clark [Green] ran for 1982 Santa Cruz city election and 1993 special CA CD 17 election along with Democratic and Peace & Freedom candidates and so by switching I was an outsider Green running where the Green Party bosses laid the groundwork for NOTA.

    Pure proportional representation is more like “all of the above” but the bosses were against it saying “we don’t need no proportional representation”. I did speak for two minutes at their convention but all the Green voters didn’t attend and so my speech wasn’t heard by many of them when I tried to explain about proportional representation in my speech.

    Even I didn’t fully understand how PPR creates mathematical unity and the meaning of PPR (pure proportional representation). Much less did we understand the gravity of google founder copying my logo jingle nor the Green Party boss and internet coordinator Cameron Spitzer’s work with Brin as he copied my logo, bought Dejaview News and deleted the conversation when he asked me “What is a joogle?”.

    It turned out twenty-three years later that by coincidence the math of pure proportional representation is a unifying equation but Google and the Green Party didn’t want anyone to know.

    Now we have demonstrated enough examples to where the Green Party has finally adopted the math correctly by which single-winner districts and plurality voting are prohibited.

    By coincidence, the United Coalition was doing it right, but then in 2012 Nicholas Sarwark (Libertarian) ran for chair of the national Libertarian Party to bring them NOTA.

    But now it seems he wants Approval Voting (AppV) which is no good. But though I did see the national LP vote counting in 2012 I am not very confident that the correct voting that unites the 100% is being used by them.

    So our team of thirty-five years, when Clint first read about us the Environmentalist Party in 1983 and ran for mayor, we still cannot get any traction as an established party unless we build a better team.

    We are like a tiny seed from which a giant tree may grow.

    http://www.allpartysystem.com/one.php

  6. I worked with programmer and CA Green Party co-founder Jennifer Woodward [Gandhian Green] between 2012 and 2017 and I think she may have shown the California Green Party what they were doing wrong with their voting. Mike Feinstein claims he brought PPR to the Green Party but he worked with NOTA campaign in 1994 when I first brought the pure proportional representation to every voters pamphlet in California in early 1994 primary election with my ballot statement about proportional representation.

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