Australia held a parliamentary election on July 2. It appears no party won a majority in the House, although this is not yet certain, because the votes are still being counted. See this wikipedia article about the election.
Also, see this news story, which says that almost one-fourth of the voters voted for a party other than the two major parties. Thanks to Jack Dean for that link.
On June 28, 2016, 120 Democrats filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, charging that the committee broke its own rules and helped Hillary Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination, instead of being neutral. The plaintiffs include 104 individuals who contributed to Bernie Sanders, 7 individuals who contributed to the Democratic National Committee, and 9 individuals who are registered Democrats. The case is Wilding v DNC Services Corporation, southern district of Florida, 0:16cv-61511.
The plaintiffs request that the lawsuit be considered a class action. The Complaint says that evidence that the DNC was not neutral is available because two groups of hackers from Russia broke into the party’s computer network a year ago, and then some of the documents were posted to a website called Guccifer 2.0. The case is assigned to Judge William J. Zlock, a Reagan appointee.
On July 8, U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove, a Bush Jr. appointee, upheld Kentucky’s definition of a qualified political party, which is a group that got 2% of the presidential vote within Kentucky in the previous presidential election. The 18-page decision in Libertarian Party of Kentucky v Grimes, e.d., 3:15cv-86, does not even discuss another aspect of the law that the plaintiffs complained about, namely that if an unqualified party wants to run a full slate of candidates for statewide state office, it must submit a separate petition for each of the 9 offices. The decision does not mention the evidence that a new party would need hundreds of thousands of signatures on multiple petitions if it wanted to run for all federal and state office. The other plaintiff in the case besides the Libertarian Party is the Constitution Party.
The only state interest identified by the decision is the need to “prevent voter confusion, avoid ballot overcrowding, and prevent frivolous candidates.” This is boiler-plate language from past unfavorable ballot access decisions.
On July 8, the Field Poll released this poll for the California U.S. Senate race. It shows that 15% of the voters have already decided to leave their ballot blank, and another 22% are undecided. The ballot lists only two Democrats, with no write-in space.
California held a presidential primary for six parties on June 7, including the American Independent Party. None of the seven candidates whose names were printed on the AIP ballot were well-known. It is now been determined that approximately two-thirds of the voters who used an AIP ballot wrote in someone for president, instead of voting for any of the listed candidates.
Amador County election officials kindly made the write-ins available, even though there were no declared write-in presidential candidates in the AIP primary. Donald Trump received the most write-in votes, and polled substantially more votes than anyone listed on the ballot. Bernie Sanders received the 2nd highest number of votes, and Hillary Clinton received the third highest. Thanks to Mark Seidenberg for this news.
