Canada holds a special parliamentary election on August 18 in the Battle River-Crowfoot riding in Alberta. Election officials have decided to issue blank ballots to all voters, and the voter must cast a write-in vote. Each voter will be furnished with an alphabetized list of the candidates. The write-in ballot decision was made because there are 214 candidates. The reason there are so many candidates is that a group that supports proportional representation organized the mass filing as a protest against the winner-take-all system.
Pennsylvania holds two statewide elections for judicial office in November 2025. The only minor party or independent candidate on the ballot is the Liberal Party’s nominee for Superior Court, Daniel Wassmer. He needed 5,000 signatures. The challenge period has passed and no one challenged his petition.
Pennsylvania also has some statewide retention elections for other judicial posts, but they aren’t candidate-versus-candidate elections.
If Wassmer gets a vote total of 2% of the winning candidate’s vote, the Liberal Party will meet the state’s pinched definition of a qualified party. A group that meets that definition gets certain advantages, but not automatic ballot access generally. Instead it gets automatic ballot access in special elections, and is listed as a choice on the voter registration form. Currently the only third party with that status in Pennsylvania is the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party will keep that status until November 2026 even though it isn’t running in any 2025 statewide judicial elections.
Here is the article from online.wsj.com.
Arizona is holding a special election for the vacant Seventh District U.S. House seat on September 23, 2025. Each qualified party had its own special primary on July 15, 2025. The Green Party and the No Labels Party each nomianted someone by write-in vote in their own primaries. The Libertarian Party also had a write-in candidate in its primary, but the person who got the most votes in the Libertarian primary can’t be on the September 23 ballot because the rules are different for the Libertarian Party.
The Green Party and the No Labels Party each petitioned in 2024, so they are considered “new” parties. “New” parties can nominate by write-in very easily. Whoever gets the most votes in their primaries is nominated, regardless of how few write-ins they received. The Green Party winner got 42 write-ins and the No Labels Party candidate got one write-in.
But the Libertarian Party is not considered a new party, because it has been continuously qualified since 2000. So write-in candidates in its primary need a large number of write-ins to be nominated.
Here are the election results for the July 15, 2025 primary.
On August 7, U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Boardman, a Biden appointee, converted CASA Inc. v Trump, 8:25cv-201, into a class action. This is the birthright citizenship lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court had been involved in. In this lawsuit, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down nationwide injunctions issued by U.S. District Courts unless either the case has been filed by a state, or the case is a class action.
On remand, the U.S. District Court converted the case into a class action and then again enjoined the Presidential order on birthright citizenship. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.