This article in the Atlanta Progressive News has quite a lot of detail about the Georgia Green Party presidential petition drive this year, and why the state did not determine that it had at least 7,500 valid signatures.
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A poll released at the end of September for U.S. House, New York 22nd district, has these results: Republican Claudia Tenney 35%; Democrat Kim Myers 30%; independent candidate Martin Babinec 24%; undecided 11%.
Babinec won the Reform Party nomination in June with write-ins. He is the only New York Reform Party nominee for Congress who is not the same person as the Republican nominee. Normally the Reform Party of New York operates as a satellite of the Republican Party. Babinec has spent $1,000,000 for his campaign, and is a businessman.
The 22nd district is usually a safe district for Republicans. The incumbent is not running for re-election. Babinec has been allowed into all the debates. The 22nd district is in central New York and runs from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania border. It includes Utica and Binghampton. Thanks to Michael Drucker for this news.
Rob Sarvis, the Virginia Libertarian nominee for U.S. Senate in 2014, will file his cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on or before December 17. The issue in the case is the Virginia law that says the parties that polled 10% in one of the two previous elections are always automatically listed at the top of the ballot. The lower federal courts had upheld the law, writing that even though they agree that being listed at the top of the ballot is advantageous, that the state has an interest in bolstering the two largest political parties against all those competing with them.
Virginia law itself acknowledges the fairness of ballot rotation, because the law says there should be a random process in every election to determine whether the Republican nominees or the Democratic nominees are listed first or second.
The Sarvis cert petition would have been due this month, but Sarvis received an extension. The Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE) is helping pay for the printing of the cert petition. COFOE thanks all the people who have contributed to COFOE this year. COFOE gets all its revenue from readers of Ballot Access News.
On October 16, the Portland Press Herald, the daily newspaper in Portland, Maine, endorsed question Five. This is the statewide initiative that asks voters if they wish to use instant runoff voting in future elections for congress and state office.
This story about the Nebraska Libertarian Party says State Senator Laura Ebke, who joined the Libertarian Party in May 2016, is helping teach party leaders how to make the party more effective. The story also says the Libertarian Party is expected to have 10,000 registered voters by the time of next month’s election. Back in February 2016 it had 6,984 registrants.