On September 12, the Labour Party of the United Kingdom released the votes cast for party leader. Jeremy Corbyn won with 59.5% of the vote. The political difference between Corbyn and the former leader of the party, Ed Milliband, could be analogized to the difference between Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders. See this story. Probably there will not be a general election in Britain until May 2020, because there was already an election in May 2015.
On September 11, Rick Perry dropped out of the Republican presidential race. He had been one of the five debaters set for the CNN September 16 debate at 6 p.m. That should mean there are now only four candidates in that debate: Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, and Lindsey Graham.
There are eleven candidates in the debate set for the same day at 8 p.m. The irony is that the candidates in the 6 p.m. debate will have more speaking time than the “more important” candidates in the 8 p.m. debate. Those times are Pacific time zone. The debates are in Simi Valley, California.
The Mayor of Kingston, New York, Shayne Gallo, is a Democrat, and he was defeated for re-nomination in the Democratic Party primary held on September 10. But he was also a candidate in the Green Party primary. Election officials will soon reveal whether he got enough write-ins in the Green Party primary to be on the November ballot as the Green nominee. See this story. UPDATE: the Green Party write-ins have now been tallied and Shayne Gallo lost the Green Party primary also. His Democratic opponent, Steve Noble, won the Green primary. See this story.
The Kennebec Journal, daily newspaper in Maine’s capital city, Augusta, carries this letter to the editor from the co-chairs of the Maine Green Party. The letter is in response to a newspaper column that accused the Green Party of being ineffectual.
On Thursday, September 10, Illinois held a special U.S. House election to fill the vacancy in the 18th district. According to this news story, Darin LaHood, the Republican nominee, received 34,907 votes; Robert Mellon, the Democratic nominee, received 15,840 votes. That totals only 50,747 votes, although when the results are official, they will probably be slightly higher.
The last time Illinois held a special U.S. House election, on April 9, 2013, to fill the vacant 2nd district seat, there were six candidates on the ballot: one Democrat, one Republican, one Green, and three independents. The turnout in that election was 83,193 votes cast, significantly better than the September 2015 race. The reason there were alternate candidates on the ballot in 2013 is that a U.S. District Court Judge had struck down the 5% petition requirement for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties, as applied to special elections. That case was Jones v McGuffage, a Green Party ballot access victory. Despite the 2013 court victory, Illinois election officials continued to require 5% petitions in the September 2015 race, and no one went to court in 2015 to change that.
