Massachusetts, for the last month, has been the only state in which it was possible for any state, this year, to pass a law requiring presidential candidates to reveal their income tax returns. The Massachusetts bill, SB 365, had a hearing on September 6, but it hasn’t moved out of the committee since then. The lack of any movement indicates almost certainly that the bill is dead.
Bill Schifino, a member of the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission, has submitted this proposed amendment to the Florida Constitution. It is proposal P62. The Commission will vote on whether to include this idea, in early 2018. The Commission has the power to put ideas for changing the state constitution on the November 2018 ballot.
Schifino’s proposal says that independent voters are free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
Currently, Florida has closed primaries, except that if only members of one party file for any particular office, then all voters can vote in that primary. Except for those special kinds of elections, Florida is the only state in the south in which independent voters cannot vote in any primaries.
The Day, daily newspaper for New London, has this story about the election of several Green Party nominees in the November 7, 2017 city election in Waterford.
Here are the election returns for New York city, from the November 7, 2017 election. The most important office up was Mayor.
One of the ironies is that Sal Albanese, who placed third, was not allowed into the mayoral general election debates, but Bo Dietl, who placed sixth, was in those debates.
On November 7, Green Party nominee Jules Mermelstein polled 5.6% of the vote for Judge of the Superior Court, a partisan race. The unofficial vote tally for him in this low turnout election was 106,614 votes. He is the first Green Party nominee for statewide office in Pennsylvania who polled as much as 3%.
The ballot listed four Republicans, four Democrats, and Mermelstein. Not everyone calculates percentages the same way in a multi-winner race. My calculation for the denominator uses the total vote cast, divided by the number of seats, in order to approximate the number of voters who cast a ballot. The state election returns page here uses a different method, which indicates that no one running got as much as 20%, which is misleading.
