Very few pollsters ask respondents about every presidential candidate on the ballot in any state. This Wason Center for Public Policy poll for the presidential race in Virginia asks about all five ballot-listed candidates: Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, Evan McMullin, Jill Stein, and Donald Trump. Also it has interesting demographic breakdowns.
On September 30, the Arizona Libertarian Party filed this amended complaint in Arizona Libertarian Party v Reagan, 2:16cv-1019. Unlike the first Complaint in this case, this Complaint was written after the August 30 primary. It shows that without question, the new law on how Libertarians may run for office other than President has been devastating to the party. Only one Libertarian has been able to qualify for the ballot in Arizona this year (excluding the presidential election).
When this case was last in court, the judge expressed some hesitation to make up his mind until he and everyone else saw what happened in the primary. In theory, the Libertarians might have been able to obtain massive numbers of write-ins in the Libertarian primary, but that did not happen, even though the Libertarian turnout in its primary was fairly substantial.
On September 28, a Connecticut state trial court put David Yaccarino on the November ballot as the Republican nominee for State House, 87th district. He had been ruled off the ballot earlier because he hadn’t signed his declaration of candidacy. See this story. It appears that after he sued, the Secretary of State and Attorney General consented to this outcome. Yaccarino is the incumbent state representative.
Colorado voters will see Amendment 71 on their November 2016 ballot. It would say that a constitutional initiative needs the signatures of 2% of the voters in each one of the 35 State Senate districts. This newspaper editorial recommends a “no” vote, because such a law would make it virtually impossible to qualify a statewide constitutional initiative.
The American Delta Party is now a ballot-qualified party in Delaware, but it attained this status too late to place nominees on the November 2016 ballot. A party is qualified in Delaware if it has at least 654 registered members. The American Delta Party has 854, so probably it will have nominees on the 2018 ballot if it is still active in 2018. See the state’s October 1, 2016 registration tally here.
The American Delta Party was created by Rocky De La Fuente. The party obtained these registered members before the August 20 deadline for new parties to become qualified. But the state refused to process approximately half of those new registrants immediately, because they were signed by voters who were switching parties. Delaware won’t let people switch parties during the three months before any primary, but does process such applications after the primary is over.
The minor parties that were already on the ballot have gained registration in the last two months at a high rate. Green Party registration since August 1 is up 24.2%; Libertarian is up 13.5%; Independent Party is up 9.1%. Thanks to Brady Olson for notifying me that the new Delaware registration data was available.
