Don Davis, a Democratic member of the U.S. House from North Carolina, is also affiliated with the Forward Party. See this story, which describes his participation in a Forward Party meeting on August 14.
4
Here are the election results for the August 18 by-election in Alberta, Canada. Because 214 candidates qualified, the elections office decided to print blank ballots, so that all votes were write-in votes. Each polling place had a list of all the qualified candidates.
Only seventeen candidates got as many as ten votes.
The reason there were so many candidates is that a group deliberately recruited as many candidates as possible, to protest the failure of the Canadian government to switch to some form of proportional representation, after decades of agitation. Canadian House of Commons candidates need 100 signatures, plus a filing fee of $1,000.
Here is a picture of the write-in ballot.
The Texas legislature’s second special session is convening this week. Democrats have returned, but they are subject to having a police escort. One Democratic Representative, Nicole Collier, has said she will remain locked in the capitol building rather than accept a police escort. See this story.
On August 18, the California Assembly amended ACA 8 to become a vehicle for redistricting U.S. House districts. The original bill did not relate to redistricting. Read it here. It does not take effect unless other states also redistrict in the next few years. It also endorses a U.S. Constitutional amendment to outlaw partisan redistricting. It has a hearing on August 19 in the Assembly Elections Committee, at 10:30 a.m.
The Assembly Elections Committee will also hear SB 280, which authorizes a special election on November 4, 2025, for voters to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment, assuming the legislature has passed it first. And the Committee will hold an informational hearing on AB 604, which has the new proposed U.S. House districts.
City Journal has this article about the growing political power of the Working Families Party of New York. The piece is by Joseph Burns. City Journal leans to the right, and is published by the Manhattan Institute. But setting aside the political slant of the article, it is a useful piece for what it explains about the New York state campaign finance laws, which give significant advantages to ballot-qualified parties relative to unqualified parties and independent candidates.
The Working Families Party is sympathetic to unqualified parties, but it has not used its political power to fight the restrictive ballot access laws passed in 2019 and 2020 in New York.