On November 8, Green Party nominee Tom Mair defeated his only opponent, Republican Christine Maxbauer, by 3,168 to 2,769, for Grand Traverse County, Michigan, County Board. See this story. Maxbauer was the incumbent and had been in office for ten years. This was Mair’s fifth time running as a Green Party nominee.
Grand Traverse County has a population of 86,000 and is in the northwest part of the lower peninsula of Michigan (the “hand”).
On November 8, North Dakota Representative Corey Mock (D-Grand Forks) was re-elected. He has been trying to improve the ballot access laws in his state. Last year he introduced a bill to repeal the law that requires a certain minimum of votes in a party’s primary before it can nominate candidates. That law is so severe, concerning state legislative elections, that no minor party nominee for legislature has been on the November ballot in North Dakota since 1976. The 2015 bill passed all committees but was defeated on the House floor.
Mock has said that he will try again in 2017 to repeal the law. No other state has a minimum vote in a primary for a ballot-listed candidate to be deemed nominated. In the past, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oklahoma had such laws, but they have all been repealed.
Here is his wikipedia page.
On November 15, Nevada State Senator Patricia Farley announced she had changed her voter registration from Republican to Independent. She had first been elected in 2014, from a Las Vegas district. She is in the middle of her four-year term. She said she will caucus with the Democrats. Thanks to Doug Goodman for this news.
She is the first independent in the Nevada legislature since 1964-1966.
The Republican Party of France and the Christian Democratic Party of France are holding a privately-administered presidential primary on November 20. Seven candidates are on the ballot. If no one gets 50%, there will be a run-off primary on November 27. The primary is open to any voter who pays two Euro’s and who signs a pledge that he or she “supports the values of the center and the right.” Party membership is not required.
The seven candidates for the nomination debated each other on November 17. In France, debate sponsors strictly apply equal time. See this story and note the time-keeping device in the front of each candidate’s podium.
The seven candidates are Jean-Francois Cope, Francois Fillon, Alain Juppe, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno LeMaire, Jean-Frederic Poisson, and Nicolas Sarkozy. The general election is in May 2017.
Back on July 20, 2016, independent presidential candidate Rocky De La Fuente filed a federal lawsuit against Arizona, over the number of signatures for an independent presidential candidate. The 2016 requirement for independents for president (and all other statewide office) was 35,514 signatures. The 2016 petition requirement for newly-qualifying parties was 20,119. De La Fuente says there can’t be an important state interest in requiring almost twice as many signatures for a single candidate when the state lets an entire new party on the ballot for substantially fewer signatures.
De La Fuente is pro se in this lawsuit. Nothing of substance has happened in the case yet. De La Fuente filed an amended complaint on November 2. The case is before Magistrate Judge John Z. Boyle.
Independent candidates have won similar cases against Alabama, Florida, Maryland, and North Carolina. However, in 2010, the Ninth Circuit upheld Hawaii’s requirement that an independent presidential candidate needed 3,711 signatures even though a new party only needed 677 signatures. The Ninth Circuit seemed to feel that both requirements sounded so easy, the difference between them was not significant. The Hawaii case had been filed by Ralph Nader in 2004.
No independent presidential candidate has qualified in Arizona since 1992.
