The Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee will hear HB 8072 on Thursday, June 12, at 5:15 p.m. This is the bill to repeal the straight-ticket device. The bill has already passed the House unanimously. Thanks to Ken Block for this news.
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On May 31, the Libertarian Party moved its national office into an office that the party owns. The new headquarters is at 1444 Duke Street, Alexandria, Va 22314. It is believed that the Libertarian Party is the only nationally-organized political party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, to own its own headquarters building. The last minor parties that owned their own headquarters buildings, it is believed, were the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, which once owned buildings in New York city.
The Libertarian Party also seems to be the only nationally organized political party that has set the location and date of its 2016 presidential convention. The Libertarian presidential convention will be in Orlando, Florida, May 26-30, 2016.
On June 10, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board ruled that nothing in Wisconsin law invalidates a petition signature, just because the voter/signer lets the circulator add the address. The ruling puts Brett Hulsey, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, on the primary ballot. See this story.
On June 9, the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania and the Green Party of Pennsylvania, and their gubernatorial nominees, filed a federal lawsuit against several Pennsylvania ballot access laws. The case challenges the ban on out-of-state circulators, and the requirement that each signer show the year of signing in the “date” column, and the requirement that each sheet be notarized, and the requirement that does not permit residents of two different counties to sign the same sheet. Green Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele, 2:14cv-3299, eastern district.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Court judge Thomas O’Neill, Jr., a Reagan appointee.
North Dakota holds primaries for all qualified parties, and no one running for statewide office can appear on the ballot in November if he or she ran in the primary and failed to get at least 300 primary votes. All three Libertarians running for statewide office in the June 10, 2014 primary have between 900 and 1,050 votes, even though as of this writing, only two-thirds of the precincts have reported. This is the first time any minor party candidates will have exceeded 1,000 votes in a North Dakota primary in the last 40 years. Here is a link to the election returns from the Secretary of State’s web page.
It isn’t easy for minor party candidates in North Dakota to poll many votes in the primary, because a voter who chooses the minor party primary is then unable to vote in a major party primary.