On June 18, France held run-off elections for the National Assembly. The first round had been a week ago. Here is a news story with the results. The President’s party, La Republique En Marche, which was running in its first election ever, apparently won 355 of the 577 seats.
The United Utah Party web page here explains why its nominee for U.S. House, third district, ought to be on the November 7, 2017 special election ballot.
The Militant, weekly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, can now be seen on-line for all issues 1946 through the present. See this link. In the near future, the issues from 1928 through 1945 will also be posted.
The Militant is the only printed weekly newspaper published by a U.S. political party. Most parties that still have print publications only publish once per month, or less frequently.
Between 1969 and 1980, the Socialist Workers Party was the most active party in the U.S. challenging restrictive ballot access laws in court. The issues of The Militant for those years are a valuable resource for anyone researching the history of the fight against such ballot access laws. Leaders of the Socialist Workers Party established a separate pressure group called CoDel (Committee for Democratic Election Laws) to gain support for these lawsuits. Such lawsuits won against various laws in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia.
The Socialist Workers Party has had more election law cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court than any other minor party.
Political scientist Boris Shor, who regularly tallies hundreds of thousands of roll-call votes in state legislatures, and who keeps track of polarization in state legislatures, now says California has been overtaken by Colorado as the most polarized legislature. Here are the new rankings.
The rankings bolster other political science research, which has found no correlation between type of primary system and degree of polarization. Among the seven most polarized states are one closed primary state (Colorado); one semi-closed primary state (Arizona); three open primary states (Missouri, Montana, and Texas); and the two top-two states, California and Washington. Although Colorado has recently switched to a semi-closed primary state, all its legislators were chosen in a closed primary system.
On June 13, the town of Standish, Maine, held an election for its own officers. Peter Starostecki, a registered Green Party member, was elected to the Town Council from area 2. Standish is in Cumberland County, the same county that contains Portland. Thanks to Michael for this news.
