New York Democratic congressman Joe Crowley was defeated for re-election in the Democratic primary on June 26, for New York’s 14th U.S. House district. The winner of the primary is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Working Families Party, which almost always desires to cross-endorse the Democratic nominee, especially in congressional races, had expected Crowley to win the Democratic primary, so it already nominated Crowley. Now the Working Families Party wants Crowley to withdraw as the WFP nominee, but according to this Vox story, he is not inclined to do so.

The story accurately quotes some experts as saying the only way Crowley can withdraw from the WFP nomination is to be nominated by the WFP for some other office that is up this year, but he doesn’t want to do that. He says it violates the spirit of the election law, because whatever other office he would be nominated for, he would not sincerely want that other office.

The story also quotes Bill Lipton, New York director for the Working Families Party, as saying that Crowley should establish his residence outside New York state, for example Virginia. Lipton is wrong about that. The matter has already been litigated, both in New York and in Texas. A congressional candidate does not lose eligibility by being a resident of another state before the election. The only residence requirement for congress in the U.S. Constitution is residency as of election day. But ballots must be printed well before election day, so moving to another state would not make any candidate ineligible.

On July 12, the Ohio Secretary of State announced that the Libertarian Party petition for 2018 is valid. The Libertarian Party is now either a qualified party, or has a statewide nominee on the ballot even though the party is not a qualified party, in every state except Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington.

Petitioning for statewide nominees is proceeding in New York and Pennsylvania. Thanks to Bill Redpath for the Ohio news.

The New York Times has this interesting story about ballot-qualified minor parties in New York. It focuses on the fairly rare instances when these parties have primaries in which all write-ins are counted (they are only counted if a particular type of petition has been filed in advance of the primary). It also says, near the bottom of the article, that write-ins are more common in primaries now than they were in the past. In the past, all New York state precincts used mechanical voting machines, and it was difficult for any voter to cast a write-in, when those machines were in use. A voter had to find a particular kind of lever on the machine to access the paper roll on which a write-in vote could be cast, and most voters didn’t know how to do that. But for the last decade, New York has used paper ballots, which makes it much easier to cast a write-in vote.