Here is a link to the election returns for Missouri’s special U.S. House election. The Constitution Party nominee, Doug Enyart, is at 3.6%. While that is not an especially strong showing, it is easily the best showing for U.S. House that the Constitution Party has ever made in Missouri. Until this election, the party had never hit as much as 2% for any of its U.S. House candidates in Missouri.
On June 3, the Illinois Libertarian Party filed a brief in U.S. District Court in Chicago, asking that the Illinois “full-slate” law be held unconstitutional. This is the law that requires newly-qualifying parties (but no other parties) to run a full slate of candidates when they petition. Last year the Court enjoined the law and suggested it is unconstitutional, but now the party seeks a formal declaration that the law is unconstitutional.
The “full-slate” law is especially injurious to minor parties when they try to run for county partisan office. The law doesn’t have any effect for U.S. House elections, or legislative elections, because those are elections in which the voters of any particular part of the state are only electing one office-holder anyway. But when parties try to run a single nominee for a county legislative body, usually that county is electing several office-holders from a single district, sometimes as many as six. Also, of course, the law creates a problem when a party wants to run for one, or several, county executive offices, but not all of them. The candidate-plaintiff in this lawsuit, Julie Fox, wanted to run for Auditor of Kane County in 2012, but she was not permitted to petition for a place on the ballot as a Libertarian unless the party nominated a full slate of all the executive positions.
The Transatlantic Academy, a research institute which studies social problems in North America and Europe, has published a report, “The Democratic Disconnect”, discussing problems of democratic governance. Here is a link to the report. The chapter on problems in the United States and Canada opens by saying, “Democracy in the U.S. is ailing, and badly in need of reform. Canadian democracy is currently working better, although there is a risk of dark clouds gathering on the horizon.”
New Jersey requires 800 signatures for an independent candidate, or for the nominee of an unqualified party, to get on the ballot for a statewide race. This year, only five petitions were submitted for Governor-Lieutenant Governor. See the state’s list here. They include Steve Welzer for the Green Party, Kenneth Kaplan for the Libertarian Party, Diane Sare for the LaRouche organization, and two independent candidates: William Araujo, who hasn’t chosen his ballot label yet, and Hank Schroeder, who uses the label “Don’t Look Back” in half the counties and “Economic Growth” in the other half.
This is the smallest number of petitioning candidates in a New Jersey gubernatorial general election since 1989, when there were a total of six candidates on the ballot. New Jersey hasn’t had any ballot-qualified parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties since the law was amended in 1920, to define “party” as a group that had polled at least 10% of the vote for Assembly in the entire state. “Assembly” is the New Jersey name for the lower house of the state legislature.
The deadline for the petitions is 4 p.m. on June 4 (Tuesday) so it is possible some more candidates will submit petitions. The link to the state list of candidates can be used to determine if more candidates enter later today.
Roll Call has this commentary by Morton Kondracke on the proposed new Centrist Party.
