On December 27, Nebraska State Senator Bob Krist, who is running for Governor in 2018, said that if he gets on the ballot via a petition to create a new party, that party will be called the United Nebraska Party. See this story.
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On December 27, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, the case over whether federal anti-trust law has any bearing on the Commission on Presidential Debates’ restrictive policy on who gets into the debates. Here is a copy of the cert petition.
On December 27, the North Carolina Democratic Party asked a U.S. District Court Judge not to grant more time for the defendants to respond in North Carolina Democratic Party v Berger, m.d., 1:17cv-1113. This is the lawsuit on whether the state violated the U.S. Constitution earlier this year when it abolished primaries for judicial offices in the 2018 election.
However, later on December 27, the Judge did grant more time for the defendants to respond. The briefs in the case are now due by January 17. It is conceivable that by then, the law will have been amended anyway. The legislature convenes on January 10 and because the Defendants are the leaders of each house of the legislature, they probably have the power to change the law quickly.
The Russian government is barring Aleksei Navalny from the March 2018 presidential ballot because he was once convicted of a crime. In the United States, it would not be possible for the government to keep anyone of the ballot for federal office because he or she was once convicted of a crime. The U.S. Constitution sets forth the qualifications to run for federal elective office, and neither the states, nor the federal government, can add to those qualifications.
This is why California Governor Jerry Brown was correct this year to veto SB 149, which barred presidential candidates from the ballot if they did not release their tax returns. And this is why it was wrong for Pennsylvania, Alabama and Arkansas to keep Rocky De La Fuente off the ballot in 2016 on the grounds that he had sought the Democratic presidential nomination earlier that year, and why it was wrong for Michigan to do the same thing to Gary Johnson in 2012.
Past presidential candidates in the United States, who were not barred from the ballot in any state because they were felons or ex-felons, include Eugene Debs, Vincent Hallinan, and Lyndon LaRouche.
Although news reports have said the Alabama Secretary of State would tally up the write-in votes cast for U.S. Senate on December 12, 2017, now the office says it will not do that. Instead it will let visitors to the Secretary of State’s web page look at the tally each county provided. But there won’t be official statewide totals for any write-in candidate. Anyone who wants to know how many write-ins any particular candidate received will be obliged to add up the figures provided by each county. Hence any total that anyone compiles won’t be “official.”
Furthermore, some of the county reports are in handwriting, and some of these reports are difficult to read.
The official totals for Doug Jones and Roy Moore will be released on Thursday, December 28.