Although the Forward Party is not ballot-qualified in Virginia, it recently qualified to have any nominees it may have this year use the party label. In Virginia, there is no petition to create a ballot-qualified party. Instead there are only candidate petitions. The candidates may use their party label only if that party has shown that it has a state committee with a representative from each U.S. House district. The State Board of Elections has determined that the Forward Party has such a committee.
This status is only useful if the party has any successful petitioning candidates this year. In Virginia, in even-years, there are no regularly-scheduled elections for state office, but there are for Congress. Presumably the Forward Party will have some congressional candidates this year; otherwise there would have been no point in getting the right to use a party label.
Although Virginia has some partisan county and city elections, there are no party labels in those elections.
They have sought and obtained the option to have such candidates. Unless you know more than what you printed, we can’t know in the basis of that information alone whether they have any such candidates already recruited, ones they are trying to recruit, ones they have who said they might be interested in their nomination, etc. If none of those, we don’t know the chances someone(s) will seek their nomination and qualify under whatever criteria they have for candidates.
Thus, again based only on what’s printed above, we can’t presume they will have such candidates. They gave themselves the option to, but the option may or may not be exercised, based on things not contained in the post.
The candidate petitions are due in June 2024.
So, the candidates who want their nomination must petition the state, and may or may not also have to petition this state committee for their right to use that label, according to whatever rules or process they have or don’t yet have for that.
So far we don’t yet know what the chances are that they will have candidates either willing or able to navigate past either or both of those hurdles. For the internal one, we don’t even know yet if it will exist yet (maybe they will just let any candidate run with their label so long as the state does), or how easy or difficult it will be.
Maybe someone knows some of that, but based on the post text and the author’s follow up comment, that’s all I know.
The final paragraph of the post is hard to understand. What is a partisan election without party labels?
White, that’s a good question. It is confusing. But a partisan election is one in which parties nominate candidates, which they do in Virginia, via primary or caucus.
Until about 1981 or so, there were no party labels on Virginia general election ballots for any office except president. And in Florida, until the 1930’s, there were also no party labels on general election ballots, not even for president. That is also true for Tennessee back then.
So parties nominated candidates, but voters would have to know or try to remember or guess which parties had nominated which candidates, if that was important to them, since party names did not appear with candidate names on the ballot.
Otherwise, they could spend a great deal of time studying all the candidates for all the different offices and their individual views and resumes or records, or vote for the best sounding names, or vote randomly, or skip the races where they couldn’t remember which candidate was with which party, etc.
That’s my understanding of your explanation. If I misunderstood, please correct that.
PARTISAN LEGIS. — SINCE LAWS ARE PARTISAN — YES/NO TO HAVE A LAW ABOUT A TO Z SUBJECTS.
LAWS — SHALL / SHALL NOT / MAY — WITH AN *IF* CONDITION IN GENERAL.
NONPARTISAN EXECS/JUDICS
I think WMCT got it right.