Ruben “R.J.” Hernandez is on the ballot as a candidate for California Assembly, 77th district, in the northeastern part of the city of San Diego. He has been a registered Democrat for several years. He was the only person who filed in the June 2014 primary to run against Republican incumbent Brian Maienschein. With only two candidates in the race, of course he easily qualified to run again in November, even though he only polled 29.4% of the vote against Maienschein in the primary.

Hernandez has announced that he has changed his registration from “Democratic” to “independent”, sometime in the last month. The Registrar of Voters’ office hasn’t processed the change yet. Although no one can stop him from making this change, California election law dictates that he will still appear on the November ballot as a Democrat. The law does not permit a candidate to have a different partisan label in the November election than the label used in the June primary.

The four candidates for U.S. House, in the special June 24 election in Florida’s 19th district, will debate on the evening of June 19. The candidates are Republican Curt Clawson, Democrat April Freeman, Libertarian Ray Netherwood, and write-in independent Timothy Rossano. The debate is in Fort Myers and is sponsored by WINK News. See this story (scroll down).

The New Hampshire Union Leader has this article about Gardner Goldsmith, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for U.S. Senate from New Hampshire. The article talks about why minor party candidates run for important office. The article is also notable because generally the Union Leader, the largest newspaper in New Hampshire, does not carry news about minor party candidates.

Most famously, in 1992, on the day of the presidential primary, the Union Leader had prepared a front page with a banner headline announcing that Patrick Buchanan had carried Dixville Notch. Dixville Notch is famous for opening its polls at 12:01 a.m. on election day and closing them an hour later. Inhabitants cooperate, knowing that the town’s election results will then be reported nationwide (in presidential election years, both for the general and the primaries) on election day. The Manchester Union had reasons to assume that Pat Buchanan would defeat President George H. W. Bush in Dixville Notch and expected to make that the front page story. But, in reality, Libertarian Andre Marrou carried Dixville Notch, suprising the newspaper’s editors and just about everyone else. The paper then scrapped the proposed Buchanan story, and confined the story that Marrou had carried the hamlet to a tiny article a few sentences long. At the time, the Libertarian Party had its own presidential primary, and more Dixville Notch voters chose to vote in the Libertarian presidential primary than the presidential primary of either major party. Because 1992 was the Libertarian Party’s first primary, New Hampshire election law let members of any party choose the Libertarian primary ballot.