On November 2, Joe Visconti, independent candidate for Governor of Connecticut, said he is dropping out of the race. He also endorsed the Republican nominee. Of course, Visconti’s name will still be on the ballot, and the votes for him will be counted. See this story.
On October 27, the New York State Court of Appeals, the highest state court in New York, agreed with the mid-level court that Gigi Bowman should be on the November 4 ballot. She is the Libertarian nominee for State Senate, 5th district. The Libertarian Party is not a qualified party in New York, so it had to collect 3,000 valid signatures to get her on the ballot.
Her Republican opponent had challenged her petition. Even after the challenger lost in the mid-level court, he appealed to the State Court of Appeals, notwithstanding that the election was only eleven days away. The case is Wilson v Bowman, 2014-1108.
John Arnold, the Texas billionaire who has contributed $2,750,000 to pass the top-two initiative in Oregon, is also the biggest donor to a PAC that has spent over $800,000 to help defeat California Congressman Mike Honda in this year’s election. See this story. Honda is a Democrat running for re-election against another Democrat, Ro Khanna.
On October 31, both sides filed final briefs in the U.S. District Court in Green Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele, eastern, 2:14cv-3299. This is the case filed this year against several Pennsylvania ballot access laws: (1) the ban on out-of-state circulators; (2) the requirement that each petition sheet be notarized; (3) the requirement that signers from different counties can’t sign the same sheet; (4) the requirement that voters can’t sign more than one petition for the same office; (5) the administrative decision to invalidate signatures from persons eligible to register to vote who haven’t actually registered, given the wording of the law that says they can sign. Several other points in the original complaint have already been resolved favorably, such as the requirement that signatures are invalid if the signer doesn’t add the year in the “date” column.
Here is the brief of the minor parties.
This case should not be confused with the other Pennsylvania ballot access case, Constitution Party of Pennsylvania v Aichele, on the issue of putting petitioning groups at risk of over $100,000 in court costs if petitions are held invalid. That is also pending in the U.S. District Court, before another judge.
On October 31, the California Secretary of State released a new registration tally, as of October 20. The previous tally had been as of September 5. Here is a link to the new data.
Compared to last month’s tally, every party gained in absolute numbers, and the number of independent voters also rose. But between the two tallies, the percentage of the electorate registered “Democratic” declined from 43.43% to 43.30%; the Republican share declined from 28.23% to 28.11%. But the share registered into each of the qualified minor parties increased, except that Peace & Freedom declined from .4422% to .4417%.
The largest unqualified party that has asked for a tally of its registrants is the Constitution Party, which went from 347 to 355 registrants.
The largest percentage increase for any group of voters was the Libertarian registration, which increased 2.78%.
