On May 16, the Alaska House Rules Committee passed SB 161. It has now passed the Senate and all committees in the house. It will probably receive a vote on the House floor on Tuesday, May 17.
It eases the definition of a qualified party, from registration membership of 3% of the last vote cast (approximately 11,000 registered members) to exactly 5,000.
John Thompson Parker, the Peace & Freedom Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California, has recently spent a week in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine. Although other U.S. politicians and members of Congress have also visited Ukraine during May, Parker is probably the only U.S. candidate who has spent his time in the Russian zone. Many activists in the Peace & Freedom Party are also active in parties that operate within PFP. Parker is with the Socialist Unity Party, which split from the Workers World Party in 2018. The Socialist Unity Party newspaper is La Lucha. Here is a link to La Lucha in which Thompson talks about his trip.
City & State has this news story about the Pennsylvania Green Party and its petition drive to place three statewide nominees on the ballot.
Scotusblog here suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to accept the cert petition in Fitisemanu v U.S., the case over whether persons born in American Samoa are automatically citizens. The lower court had ruled that they are not. The case arose when some individuals living in Utah, who were born in American Samoa and who never went through the naturalization process, could register to vote in Utah. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
Marc J. Victor has qualified to appear on the Arizona Libertarian primary ballot of August 2, 2022. He is the first Libertarian to qualify for the Libertarian primary ballot in Arizona, for any federal or state office, since the legislature made primary ballot access for small established parties very difficult. That change was made in 2015.
Other Libertarians this year have filed as write-ins in the primary, but the 2015 law makes it extremely difficult for established minor parties to nominate by write-in in their own primary.
Qualified minor parties that have not been on the ballot for very long are permitted to nominate by write-in in their own primaries, with only a single write-in vote. Thus the Green Party had nominees on the Arizona ballot in 2016 and 2018. But in 2020 and this year, the Green Party is not ballot-qualified.
