On November 3, voters in Limestone County, Alabama, elected LaDon Townsend to the County Commission. He had not wanted to run as an independent, but last year the local Republican Party refused to permit him to file in the Republican primary. See this story. Townsend defeated the Republican incumbent.
Limestone County is in northern Alabama and borders Tennessee.
On November 3, independent candidate Keith Higgins was elected Prosecutor in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit of southeast Georgia. See this story. The race is a partisan race. The only two candidates on the ballot were the incumbent Republican, and Higgins. Higgins needed approximately 3,000 signatures to get on the ballot in this five-county district. That is 5% of the number of registered voters in the district.
Tentative national vote totals for the five candidates who were on in at least ten states, but not a majority of the electoral college, are: Kanye West 62,173; Rocky De La Fuente 61,358; Gloria La Riva 58,966; Don Blankenship 55,383; and Brock Pierce 43.120.
When all the votes are counted, De La Fuente and La Riva will probably have more votes than Kanye West, because De La Fuente and La Riva were both on in California, a state in which millions of votes still haven’t been counted.
New Mexico now has only three qualified parties, Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian. The Green Party and the Constitution Party needed to poll one-half of 1% for president. Unofficial returns show that 4,586 votes were needed. The Green Party received 4,373, which was 213 votes too few.
It is not too surprising that the Constitution Party didn’t poll one-half of 1%, because it has never met that vote test in New Mexico.
The Better for America Party could have kept its qualified status if it had run just one candidate for any partisan office, but it did not, so it is also off the ballot. The law says a party that abstains from running for President may keep its qualified status. But there is another law, which removes parties if they have not run anyone for any partisan office in either of the last two elections, and Better for America failed this test. The Better for America Party had qualified in 2016 and had run Evan McMullin for president.
The Libertarian Party kept its qualified major party status by polling 7% of the vote for a statewide judicial race. It needed a number of votes equal to 5% of the presidential vote, and it met that requirement.
The Green Party and the Constitution Party can regain their qualified minor party status if they submit a petition signed by one-half of 1% of the 2018 gubernatorial vote, which is 3,483 signatures.
Earlier this year, the Montana Democratic Party sued to remove the Green Party from the ballot. The state and federal courts ordered the removal of the party in August, even though everyone agreed it had enough valid signatures in March, and even though it was given its own primary in June. The removal was accomplished by the Democratic Party asking people who had signed the petition to put the party on the ballot to remove their names. Only 600 people removed their names, out of over 13,000 signatures that had been submitted, but that was enough to remove the party because it lost its needed signatures in one state house district, and the state has a difficult distribution requirement for the statewide party petition.
The Democrats were motivated to take this action because they hoped to elect Governor Steve Bullock to the U.S. Senate. But Bullock lost to incumbent Steve Daines by ten percentage points. See the results here.
The 2018 Green Party lawsuit, challenging the distribution requirement, is pending in the Ninth Circuit. The distribution requirement is unconstitutional based on a U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Moore v Ogilvie, that distribution requirements must be equal. The Montana requirement is not. In some districts as few as 55 signatures are needed; in others 150 are needed. Therefore the voters of some districts have more clout than those in certain other districts.
