On July 5, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that special U.S. House elections are partisan elections. See this story. As a result, there will be eight candidates on the ballot in the September 2011 election in the 2nd district: the Republican nominee, the Democratic nominee, the Libertarian nominee, the Independent American Party nominee, and four independents.
If the ruling had gone the other way, there would have been 30 candidates on the ballot, none of them a party nominee.
On July 3, Fred Newman, the founder of the New Alliance Party, died. He was 76. See this story. Thanks to Nancy Hanks for this news.
The New Alliance Party made history in 1988, when it placed its presidential nominee, Lenora Fulani, on the ballot in all 50 states. The party also elected a Nebraska State Senator in 1988, although technically the election was non-partisan. Ernie Chambers was the New Alliance Party’s U.S. Senate nominee in Nebraska that year, and was a registered member of the New Alliance Party. He couldn’t be on the ballot simultaneously as a candidate for re-election to the State Senate, so he won with write-in votes.
On July 5, the Kansas Secretary of State determined that Americans Elect has enough valid signatures on its petition for party status. This is the first newly-qualifying party in Kansas since 1998. The only other ballot-qualified parties in Kansas are the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Reform Parties.
Americans Elect is the first party on the ballot in Kansas since 1896 that has more than one word in its name. In 1897 the Kansas legislature had passed a law saying a party could have only one word in its name, other than the word “Party.” The legislature did this because in 1896 the Democratic and Peoples Party had circumvented the state’s ban on fusion by running a single ticket under the party name ”Democratic Peoples Party.”
In 2000, the Natural Law Party won a lawsuit against the one-word restriction. This is an example of how new parties, like Americans Elect, have benefited from past activism of older minor parties.
Current Colorado law lets individuals contribute only half as much money to an independent candidate as to a Democrat or a Republican. In 2010 a supporter of an independent candidate for the legislature filed a lawsuit against this discriminatory policy. The U.S. District Court referred the question to the Colorado Supreme Court, and asked the Colorado Supreme Court to determine if the state law violates the Colorado constitution. The State Supreme Court will hear that question on either September 27, 28 or 29. The Colorado Supreme Court, like most state supreme courts, doesn’t sit during the summer. The case is Riddle v Ritter.
On July 4, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed SB 1586. It includes many election law changes. It reduces the number of signatures needed for local referendum petitions, from 10% of the number of registered voters, to 8% of the last gubernatorial vote.
It also says that for statewide referendum petitions, the signatures need not be segregated by jurisdiction. The Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002 requires all states to have a centralized data base of that state’s registered voters. Apparently the Illinois legislature believes that, therefore, there is no longer any need to require that a single petition sheet for a referendum contain only signatures from a single county. No such change was made for statewide candidate petitions, however.
Shortly, the University of South Carolina will publish “Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics”, by Political Science and History Professor J. David Gillespie. The book has already received attention from political scientists. The American Political Science Association’s “Political Organizations and Parties” section has its own quarterly newsletter, “Vox Pop.” The latest issue of “Vox Pop” (the spring 2011 issue) devotes its first two pages to a description of the book.