Walter Patton, an independent candidate for Mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, doesn’t know yet if his name will be on November ballot. He got the needed 50 valid signatures, but after he submitted them, some of the signers say they want to remove their names. Most states, including Mississippi, have no procedure for signers to remove their names after the petition has been submitted. See this story.

In the absence of a statutory provision covering withdrawal of signatures, it seems inappropriate to let signers withdraw their signatures after the petition has been submitted. If that were allowed generally, opponents of any petition (whether a candidate petition or a petition for a ballot measure or a recall petition) could sign petitions insincerely, and then demand that their names be removed. That would violate due process for the petitioning groups, because they could never know if they had enough signatures before it was too late.

The Mayor of Rockford, Illinois, hopes to place a ballot measure on the ballot next year asking if the city should switch from partisan city elections to non-partisan city elections. See this story. Rockford is the most populous city in Illinois that uses partisan city elections. The only two cities in Illinois that are more populous, Chicago and Aurora, use non-partisan elections.

PolicyMic has this interesting interview with Gary Johnson. It covers his policy ideas, but it also has a great deal about his experience being the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 2012.

Toward the end, the part of the interview concerning the Electoral College is not fleshed out enough to be clear. The Electoral College system does discriminate against new parties and independent candidates, but only because the U.S. Constitution says if no one gets a majority of the Electoral College, the U.S. House chooses the President. However, a minor party or independent presidential candidate who manages to get a majority of the Electoral College vote is not disadvantaged by that Constitutional provision. In 1992, if Ross Perot had doubled his popular vote, and his increased popular votes had come equally from the ranks of Bush voters and Clinton voters, then Perot would have had a majority of the Electoral College and would have been elected.