The American Solidarity Party is now on the board of the Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE), which was founded in 1985 and which is a very loose coalition of most of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, along with other organizations that care about ballot access for new and minor parties and independent candidates.

COFOE raises some funds, which are generally used to help pay for ballot access lawsuits. COFOE is expecting to pay for the printing costs soon for the North Carolina challenge to the March 3 independent presidential petition deadline. The Fourth Circuit had upheld that deadline, even as applied to presidential candidates, despite the U.S. Supreme Court having ruled in 1983 in Anderson v Celebrezze that Ohio’s March 20 is too early.

In 2020, the Independent Party of Connecticut had 122 nominees for state and federal office. Sixteen of them were not nominees of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Among the 106 nominees who were nominees of one of the major parties, 87 were Republicans and 19 were Democrats.

Although that shows a strong preference for Republicans, it was still quite different from 2018 and earlier years, when almost all the Independent Party nominees were also Republican nominees. In 2018, the party only had five nominees who were not also major party nominees. Among the 121 nominees who were also major party nominees, 116 were Republicans and only five were Democrats.

The Independent Party is ballot-qualified for all the statewide offices except President, and is ballot-qualified for most of the district offices. If it had been ballot-qualified for president in 2020, it would have placed Rocky De La Fuente on the ballot, because the Independent Party is affiliated with the Alliance Party, and the Alliance Party had nominated De La Fuente.

On December 1, the Alaskan Independence Party filed a lawsuit against the top-four primary, the initiative that passed earlier this month. The lawsuit is filed in state court and depends on the Alaska constitution. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 2005 in State of Alaska v Green Party that the Alaska constitution gives greater protection to political parties than the U.S. Constitution does. In the 2005 case, the state had required separate primary ballots for each qualified party. The Green Party and the Republican Moderate Party sued over that law, and said they had a right to participate in a blanket primary, in which members of each of those two parties would appear on a joint primary ballot. They won the case, even though when they filed the case, in 2003, they were no longer qualified parties. See this story about the new lawsuit.

The Alaskan Independence Party wants to nominate its own candidates. The top-four primary permits individuals who have no support from the party to run for office with the party’s label, and the party thus loses control over its name on ballots. UPDATE: here is the Complaint.