New York state has a unique law, which gives political party officials the power to determine if a non-member of the party should be permitted to run in that party’s primary. New York State Senator Malcolm Smith, a Democrat, is running for Mayor this year, and he allegedly bribed some individuals to help him get permission to run in the Republican primary. See this story and this story. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the first link, and Christopher Cole for the second link.
A bipartisan group of Maine legislators has introduced LD 1309, to increase the amount of public funding for qualifying candidates for state office. See this story.
The California Independent Voters Network has this article by Edward Bonnette, explaining the difference between open primaries and top-two primaries. CAIVN carries articles of varying viewpoints, but for the most part it is a site run by supporters of top-two primaries. This article is very useful because in the past, many advocates of top-two systems have insisted on referring to top-two systems as “open primaries”. As the article explains, in open primaries, each party has its own nominees and its own primary, so “open primary” is not a good term for top-two systems.
At the November 2012 election, Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode received 419 write-ins for President in Pennsylvania. This information is from the official county election returns that were submitted to the Secretary of State. Because state employees did not tabulate them, two volunteers from the Constitution Party themselves examined the returns and tallied the state total. The volunteers note that ten of the 67 counties failed to mention any presidential write-ins at all.
The Goode write-ins should be considered the only valid write-in votes for President, because Virgil Goode is the only presidential candidate who was not on the ballot in Pennsylvania, but who did submit a list of presidential elector candidates. He submitted a slate of presidential elector candidates when he submitted his petition. Pennsylvania general election presidential petitions must contain such a list of presidential elector candidates.
Tennessee State Senator Frank Niceley won’t seek to advance his SB 471. See this story. SB 471 is the bill to let state legislators, instead of primary voters, nominate their party’s U.S. Senate nominees.
