The Louisiana Secretary of State’s web page is reporting election returns for the November 16 election as the votes are counted. See here. Toggle back and forth between the statewide races and the legislative races.
The Independent Party representative, Roy Daryl Adams, has won re-election with 54% of the vote against his Republican opponent, in the 62nd district.
On November 5, 2019, Bob Goodrich was elected Township Supervisor in Osceola Township, Tioga County. He is the state chair of the Constitution Party of Pennsylvania. He was on the ballot as the Constitution Party nominee and received 170 votes. A Republican ran a write-in campaign against him but only received 21 votes.
UPDATE: the Constitution Party also re-elected two members to the Duchesne, Utah city council, Jason Baker and Bryce Hamilton. That election was non-partisan.
On November 15, U.S. District Court Judge Mark E. Walker struck down the Florida law that says the candidates listed first on the general election ballot, for partisan races, will be the nominees of the party that won the last gubernatorial election. Jacobson v Lee, n.d. 4:18cv-262.
The 74-page opinion gets to the merits on page 26. The first 26 pages clear away procedural objections to the lawsuit, which was filed by the Democratic Party last year.
The opinion merely says that the existing law is unconstitutional, and does not tell the state how to change it. The opinion suggests that putting candidates on the ballot in alphabetical order would be easier, administratively, than rotating names.
Footnote 21 lists the states that do not give one particular party an advantage relating to ballot order, and has citations to the laws of each of those states.
The opinion does not suggest in any way that only the Democratic Party nominees should benefit from the ruling. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the news and the link.
Newsday, one of New York state’s largest daily newspapers, here editorializes that ballot access is too easy in the state, and should be made more difficult. The editorial recommends that the definition of “political party” be changed from a group that got 50,000 votes for Governor, to one that got 150,000. That change, if in effect now, would remove the Libertarian, Green, Working Families, Independence, and SAM Parties from the ballot. Only the Conservative, Democratic, and Republican Parties would be left.
The editorial says the 50,000 vote test was set in 1935, and tripling it would only keep up with growth. Actually if it were to be increased in accord with the growth in the electorate, the new requirement would be 54,850, not 150,000. In 1936 the gubernatorial vote was 5,557,339 (not counting blank votes). In 2018 it was 6,097,368 (again, not counting blank votes). That is an increase of only 9.7%.
The editorial fails to mention that New York is one of only eleven states that lacks any procedure for a group to become a qualified party in advance of any particular election.
At one time or another, between 1974 and 2017, the Libertarian Party attained qualified status in 43 states, but never New York. Only in November 2018 did the Libertarian Party attain qualified status in New York. That shows that in realistic terms, New York already has one of the nation’s most difficult thresholds for qualified party status.
Filing for the New Hampshire presidential primaries ended on Friday, November 15. There were 17 Republican candidates and 33 Democratic candidates. One can see the list at the Secretary of State’s web page.
