The Sun, San Bernardino’s daily newspaper, invited readers to comment on California’s top-two system. It then published the comments of seven individuals. See them here.
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The Montana Newspaper Association and Montana Public Broadcasting System will jointly sponsor general election debates for U.S. Senate and U.S. House on June 14, Saturday. All three candidates in each race (the Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian) will be included. The debates will be in the Library Auditorium at Montana Tech in Butte, and will be broadcast on Public TV. See this story.
Filing has closed for Vermont’s primaries. No Democrat is running for Lieutenant Governor. The incumbent Republican Lieutenant Governor, Phil Scott, is running for re-election. The Progressive Party is running Dean Corren for Lieutenant Governor, and Corren, a former Progressive Party state legislator, has qualified for public funding, so he will probably have more financial resources for his campaign than Scott does.
Vermont has public funding for only two offices, Governor and Lieutenant Governor. The program had not previously been used by any candidate since 2004. Corren had to raise contributions from 750 voters in order to qualify, and those contributions had to equal $17,500. Individual contributions did not count above $50, and no single county could contribute more than 25% of the total needed. Corren will receive $200,000 in public funding.
Here is the list of primary candidates. The Liberty Union Party has nominees for six of the seven statewide offices; the Democratic Party has nominees for six of the seven offices; the Republican Party only has nominees for three of the seven statewide offices; the Progressive Party has nominees for three of the seven offices and is cross-endorsing the Democratic nominee for Auditor. The Secretary of State’s list does not list the nominees of unqualified parties, nor does it list the independent candidates. The Libertarian Party, which is on the ballot but which is not eligible to nominate by primary, has a nominee for Governor but no other statewide office.
On June 12, Jonathan Pelto, a former Democratic state legislator in Connecticut, formally announced he will seek the governorship this year under the label of his Education & Democracy Party. He will also try to obtain the Working Families Party nomination. See this story.
This Christian Science Monitor article discusses the June 3 primary in Virginia’s 7th U.S. House District, in which incumbent Eric Cantor was defeated for re-nomination. It considers the claims that two particular Democratic activists influenced partisan Democratic voters to vote in the open Republican primary against Cantor, not because they favored his Republican opponent, but to injure the Republican Party. However, the article seems to suggest that these claims are overblown.