On May 22, the New Jersey Green Party gubernatorial nominee, Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, submitted his petition to be on the ballot.
Reply
On May 23, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously that the initiative for ranked choice voting passed by the voters in 2016 conflicts with the Maine Constitution. The Maine Constitution since 1880 has said that winners are determined by plurality. The opinion says that if there were three candidates in a Maine ranked choice election, and one candidate got the most first-choice votes, but after the second- and third-place votes had all been counted, the candidate who had got the most first-choice votes was still defeated, that outcome would not conform to the State Constitution.
Here is the 51-page opinion. The case is Opinion of the Justices, Questions Propounded by the Maine Senate, OJ-17-1. The first forty pages are devoted to procedural questions as to whether the court should even issue an opinion. Thanks to Dave Kadlecek for this news.
Proponents of ranked choice voting might have circulated an initiative to amend the state constitution, but Maine does not allow initiatives to change the state constitution.
On May 22, the California Assembly passed AB 469 by 62-8. It shrinks the amount of time in which candidates may circulate petitions in lieu of filing fee. But it reduces the number of signatures required. Statewide office drops from 10,000 to 7,000. U.S. House and State Senate go from 3,000 to 2,000. Assembly from 1,500 to 1,000.
Joel Fox analyzes what we now know about the California 2018 gubernatorial race. His analysis assumes the top-two system will remain unchanged for that election.
During the years 1970 through 2016, there have been 10,463 regularly-scheduled U.S. House elections (this includes Delegate from the District of Columbia for the years 1972-2016; there was no such election in D.C. in 1970). During those years, there have been 7,220 U.S. House candidates on the ballot who were not the nominees of the Democratic or Republican Parties.
The state with the fewest non-Democratic, non-Republican candidates on the ballot for U.S. House during those years has been Georgia. There has been only one individual, Billy McKinney (Cynthia McKinney’s father), who ever appeared on a regularly-scheduled Georgia ballot in the period 1970 to the present and who was not a Democratic or Republican nominee. He was able to qualify because the normal Georgia petitioning requirement was suspended the year he ran, 1982, in the two Atlanta districts, due to late redistricting.
Every other state has had at least twelve minor party or independent candidates for U.S. House on the ballot, during the period 1970-2016. The state with the most such candidates was California: 983 such candidates. This isn’t surprising, because California was the state with the most seats during that period.
Besides Georgia, the states with the fewest candidates have been: South Dakota 12, West Virginia 12, New Mexico 16, Montana 17, and North Dakota 17. The June 1, 2016 print issue of B.A.N. will contain a chart showing the number of candidates in each state, in each year 1970 through 2016.
The reason Georgia has had no candidates on the ballot (in years when its regular petition requirement was in effect) is that its requirement is so impossibly difficult. The law requires a petition of 5% of the number of registered voters. No one has complied with it since 1964. Back in 1964, when one independent, Milton Lent, did qualify, Georgia did not check the validity of such petitions, did not require petition sheets to be notarized, did not require the petitions until October, and there were no counties split by a congressional district boundary. The 1964 session of the legislature moved the deadline to an earlier date, imposed notarization, imposed petition validity checks, and changed the boundaries of the U.S. House districts to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s one person-one vote rulings so that counties had to be split.