According to this Newsday story, the Nassau County Republican organization has recruited a 25-year-old nephew of the head of the county Industrial Development Agency to run for Nassau County Executive this year. The organization carried out a petition drive to place him on the Green Party primary ballot, which required 60 valid signatures of Green Party registrants. The story implies the candidate, Phillipp Negron, was not even registered to vote until three weeks ago. If he had been registered to vote in another party, New York election law would not have permitted him to switch his party registration to the Green Party; he would have to have done that last year. The local Green Party organization had not previously been aware of him.

Republicans hold the office, but the race is expected to be close this year. Of course it does not necessarily follow that voters who vote for a Green Party nominee would have voted Democratic if the Green had not been running. Polls for the special U.S. House election in South Carolina earlier this year showed that a large proportion of the people who said they expected to vote for the Green nominee were people who said they had voted for Mitt Romney for President in November 2012. Thanks to Timothy McKee for the link.

On July 16, former President Jimmy Carter said in a speech, “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy”. See this story. In 2003, Carter said that he deplores Georgia’s ballot access laws, but that he saw no hope that they would change unless a court strikes them down.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has this book review in the New York Review of Books. The book Stevens reviews is “Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy”, by Gary May. Stevens’ review carries some strong criticisms of last month’s decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act.