On May 28, Public Policy Polling released a poll for the Georgia gubernatorial race. The results: incumbent Republican Nathan Deal 43%; Democrat Jason Carter 43%; Libertarian Andrew Hunt 7%; undecided 7%. Thanks to PoliticalWire for this news.
On May 21, the Indiana Libertarian Party, the Libertarian National Congressional Committee, and an individual donor who wishes to support the Libertarian Party congressional campaign filed a lawsuit to overturn part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictions on political parties. The case is Rufer v Federal Election Commission, 1:14cv-837. The case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper in the District of Columbia. He has only been a judge for two months.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn the contribution limits for individual donors who wish to support the party’s federal campaign efforts, but only in instances at which the donation would be spent independently of the candidate being supported. The lawsuit is being done for the plaintiffs by the Coolidge-Reagan Foundation. The lawsuit is very similar to a lawsuit filed a few days later by the Republican Party. PAC’s can now received unlimited donations to support federal candidates, if the spending is independent of the candidate. The two lawsuits argue that there is no reason to treat political parties less favorably than PAC’s.
Here are the British results for the European Parliament elections. As the article shows clearly, seven parties won at least one seat to the European Parliament from Great Britain. This is because for these elections, Britain used proportional representation. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
The May 27 San Francisco Chronicle will have this story about AB 2351, the bill to ease the definition of “political party” in California. Near the end of the story, the article says if the bill passes, a party will need 5,900 registered members. That is an error; it should say 59,000.
According to this article, Karl Tatgenhorst, the Libertarian Party nominee for Secretary of State of Indiana, will campaign partly on a platform of easing Indiana ballot access laws.
Indiana has the nation’s most severe law in the nation for candidates who want to get on a presidential primary ballot. Years after the 2008 Indiana presidential primary was over, Democratic Party officials in Indiana were convicted of forging names on the petitions of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but their motivation was that without the forgery, the petitions for each of them would have failed.
Worse yet are the Indiana laws for minor party and independent candidates. Indiana is one of only two states in which no petition to get a presidential candidate on the November ballot has succeeded in any of the last three presidential elections; the other such state is Georgia. While there is considerable agitation to improve the Georgia ballot access laws, there has been little commentary or activism about this problem in Indiana in the recent past.
The Libertarian Party has safely been on the ballot in Indiana starting in 1994, because it always meets the vote test to stay on, polling 2% for Secretary of State every four years. But the Constitution Party, the Green Party, the Natural Law, and Ralph Nader, never appeared on any Indiana statewide ballot. Indiana, Oklahoma and Georgia are the only three states about which that statement is true.
