Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush is seeking his 13th term next year. In Illinois, candidates need petitions to appear on a primary ballot. Rush needs 1,314 valid signatures for the March 2016 primary. He submitted 3,100, but one of his Democratic opponents, Alderman Howard Brookins, challenged the Rush petition. On December 17, employees of the Board of Elections checked the signatures and found that Rush has 1,407 valid signatures, so he had 93 more signatures than he needed. However, that is a validity of only 45.4%.

The challenger still has an opportunity to contest the findings, but Rush will probably prevail.

Rush is perhaps most famous as the only individual who ever defeated Barack Obama in an election for public office. In 2000, Obama, then a State Senator, ran against Rush for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House seat, but Rush won the primary.

The Tennessee Secretary of State’s web page has been altered recently. On December 22, 2015, it said that presidential primary candidates can’t be independent presidential candidates in November. But the same portion of that page now (as of December 25, 2015) says only that they can’t be nominees of a different political party; it no longer says they can’t be independent candidates. See that page here.

The page might have been changed because it was pointed out that Tennessee let John B. Anderson run as an independent in November 1980 even though he had run in the Tennessee Republican presidential primary the same year. Also in 2012 Tennessee let Gary Johnson run as an independent in November 2012 even though he had run in the Tennessee Republican presidential primary the same year.

John McAfee, who had previously said he would run for president in 2016 as the nominee of his Cyber Party, has now said he will join the Libertarian Party and seek its presidential nomination. See this story in USA Today.