Pennsylvania makes it illegal for persons associated with legal gambling to make any campaign contributions to candidates for state or local office, or to political parties. They may not even make independent expenditures. On August 15, 2017, several potential donors filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the law. It is Deon v Barasch, m.d. 1:17cv-1454. The case has a management conference on December 20, 2017. It is before Judge Sylvia Rambo, a Carter appointee. Here is the amended complaint.
Greg Orman was an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in 2014, and he got 42.5% of the vote. There was no Democrat in that race. According to this story, he plans to run as an independent for Governor of Kansas in 2018.
On December 6, Russian president Vladimir Putin, 65, said he will run for re-election. He did not specify whether he would be the nominee of his own party, or whether he would be an independent candidate. See this New York Times story.
The new North Carolina ballot access law for parties, SB 656, takes effect on January 1, 2018. It says that any party that “had a candidate nominated by that group on the general election ballot of at least 70% of the states in the prior Presidential election” is a qualified party in North Carolina, once it proves that it was on in that many states.
The State Board of Elections has now created a form for use by a group to prove that its presidential nominee was on the ballot in at least 35 states in the preceding election. The form must be completed by state election officials in each of the 35 or more states. The Green Party, which will be the first party to take advantage of the new law, placed Jill Stein on the ballot in 44 states in 2016. But now the burden is on the Green Party of North Carolina to get this form filled out by state election officials in other states. Here is the form.
Many state election officials will probably be surprised to get a letter from the Green Party, asking that the form must be filled out and returned to the Green Party, which then will forward it to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. The form must be notarized. All this work seems unnecessary, because the Federal Election Commission, and also the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, both publish books that would prove that Jill Stein was on the ballot in at least 44 states.
On December 2, the Alaska Republican State Committee voted to ask the Elections Division to bar three incumbent Republican state house members from filing in the 2018 Republican primary. The three incumbents voted in early 2017 to organize the House under Democratic control. See this story. Thanks to Ray Metcalfe for the link.
