On June 1, the ballot-qualified Legal Marijuana Now Party of Nebraska nominated Cornel West for president.
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On July 6, the Legal Marijuana Now Party of Minnesota held its convention in Bloomington, Minnesota. It nominated Dennis Schuller for president and Rudy Reyes for vice president.
The party is not ballot-qualified, but has enough organizational strength to petition for Schuller.
The Republican National Convention begins on Monday, July 15. There is a strong recent tradition that the front-runner for the presidential nomination always chooses the vice-presidential running mate informally before the convention starts. This tradition has been unbroken in the Democratic and Republican conventions in all cases since 1980.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan didn’t express his preference for George H. W. Bush for vice-president until after the presidential roll-call, near the end of the convention. Reagan took a long time an unusually long time to choose Bush over former President Gerald Ford as his running mate.
Since then, the range of days between the presumptive presidential nominee expressing his or her preference for a running mate has varied from one to twenty days before the start of the convention. The longest advance decision (for tickets that weren’t running for re-election) was the Democratic choice in 2004, when John Kerry expressed his opinion twenty days before the opening of the convention. The shortest was the Republican convention of 1988, when George H.W. Bush didn’t express his opinion until one day before the convention opening.
Illinois has an infamous election law, sec. 10-4, which says “No person shall circulate or certify petitions for candidates of more than one political party, or for an independent candidate or candidates in addition to one political party, to be voted upon at the next primary or general election, or for such candidates and parties with respect to the same political subdivision at the next consolidated election.”
This law has long inhibited petitioning in Illinois, because it is construed to mean that if an individual circulated a petition in an Illinois primary, then that same petitioner can’t work on a general election petition.
Now the individual who is challenging the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. independent petition in Illinois, Joseph Duffy, is claiming that all Kennedy petition sheets circulated by someone who also worked on Kennedy petitions in other states are invalid, under section 10-4. This is a new twist, and is not likely to be well-received. When section 10-4 was upheld by the Seventh Circuit in John W. Moore Party v Board of Election Commissioners in 1988, the rationale that the judges accepted was that section 10-4 is a type of “sore loser” law. Obviously that makes no sense in connection with a petitioner who works for the same candidate in different states. Thanks to Sam Cahnman for sending me the copy of the objection to the Kennedy petition.
On July 5, the Cornel West independent presidential campaign submitted 29,000 signatures to the Georgia Secretary of State. The legal requirement is 7,500.
Georgia election officials customarily do a very poor job of checking signatures. The validity is invariably low because the various county election offices don’t have clear guidance from the state. No one has got on the Georgia ballot by petition since 2000. Furthermore, Georgia has a law that an entire sheet is invalid if it contains even one signature with an address that is not in the county for which that petition is for.
Other groups submitting a presidential petition in Georgia this year are the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. campaign and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
The Libertarian Party is now ballot-qualified for all statewide office. The Green Party is on for president because under the new law, it is on for president because it is also on in at least 20 other states or territories.