Australia held a Parliamentary election on September 7. All of the seats in the House, and slightly over half the seats in the Senate, were up. Although not all results are final, Australia’s minor parties did better than they usually do.

The House uses single-member districts and ranked-choice voting (instant-runoff voting). The tentative results are Liberal-National Coalition 86, Labor 57, Green 1, Australian Party 1, independent 1, four seats not yet determined.

The Senate uses proportional representation. The new Senate will apparently be: Liberal-National Coalition 33, Labor 25, Green 10, Palmer United 2, and one seat each for these parties: Liberal Democratic 1, Xenophon Group 1, Family First 1, Democratic Labor 1, Motoring Enthusiast 1, Sports Party 1. No party has a majority in the Senate. For more about the election, see the wikipedia story.

According to this story, 21% of the voters cast a ballot for a party other than one of the two major parties.

This story explains that the Green Party victory in the House was unexpected, because the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor each recommended to their voters and supporters that the voter’s second choice vote be given to the other major party, not the Green.

This story, which is intriguing but not very clear (to me, anyway) talks about the Senate results and the small parties that each won a seat.

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Party did not win a Senate seat; see this article.

The September 8 Washington Post has this lengthy story, listing all the election law changes made by the 2013 session of the North Carolina legislature. The story is useful, but unfortunately it will give readers a false impression about ballot access for minor parties. One of the subtitles in the story says, “It’ll be cheaper for third parties to get on the ballot.” The story then accurately explains that the 2013 session of the legislature lowered the number of signatures in lieu of a filing fee, for candidates who don’t wish to pay the candidate filing fee.

Unfortunately, the change in the petition in lieu of filing fee has virtually no practical significance, because it is still cheaper for a candidate to pay the filing fee than to get the signatures of 5,000 voters (the old petition in lieu of the filing fee was 10,000 signatures). Because the article’s subtitle refers to third parties, instead of petitions in lieu of filing fees, an ordinary reader will think that North Carolina recently reformed its severe ballot access petition requirements for newly-qualifying parties and independent candidates, but the legislature rejected bills to do that. North Carolina still requires 89,366 valid signatures for ballot access. The House passed a bill to at least study the issue of ballot access, but the State Senate rejected that bill also.

The story also errs when it says only four states now have straight-ticket devices. Actually twelve states still have them. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.

The ballot-qualified Constitution Party of Oregon has recently voted to become the Oregon state affiliate of the Independent American Party. However, the Oregon Constitution Party plans to retain its name. If the Oregon Constitution Party were to change its name to something different, it would only have a year or so to ask its registered members to fill out a new voter registration form, leaving the Constitution Party and re-registering under the new name. Oregon requires a party to have registration of one-tenth of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, and getting the needed 1,453 registrations is a burden the party doesn’t wish to undertake.

Also, Oregon already has a ballot-qualified party named the Independent Party, so even if the state Constitution Party did ask the Secretary of State to let it change its name, it could not have the name “Independent American Party” because the word “Independent” is already pre-empted.

The Oregon Constitution Party disaffiliated from the national Constitution Party in 2006, mostly because of a disagreement over public policy concerning abortion. In 2008 the Oregon Constitution Party nevertheless nominated Chuck Baldwin for President, who was also the national Constitution Party’s nominee. But in 2012, the Oregon Constitution Party nominated Ron Paul for President. When he declined their nomination, the Oregon Constitution Party nominated Will Christensen for President. Christensen held himself out as the presidential nominee of a new party, the Independent American Party, but he did not get on the ballot in any state except Oregon, so the reference books that gather election data list him as the nominee of the Constitution Party of Oregon, not the Independent American Party.

The national leaders of the Independent American Party have been working inside the ballot-qualified Americans Elect Party of Arizona. But the only states with ballot-qualified parties named “Independent American” are Nevada and New Mexico. In Nevada, the Independent American Party is the Nevada state affiliate of the Constitution Party. In New Mexico, the founder of the ballot-qualified Independent American Party, Jon Barrie, has lost interest in that party and is now state chair of the New Mexico Constitution Party. The New Mexico Independent American Party appears to not have any state officers, because its former officers have abandoned the party.