The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Upstate Jobs Party v Kosinski, 24-503, at its December 6 conference. This is the case challenging New York state law that lets individuals bigger campaign contributions to nominees of qualified parties than they may give to independent candidates or the nominees of unqualified parties. Here is the Upstate Jobs Party’s cert petition.
The state has already told the U.S. Supreme Court that it doesn’t plan to file a response.
Some counties in New York state have tallied the number of write-in votes. The returns for those counties suggest approximately 1% of voters cast a write-in vote for president. If that holds for the entire state, there will probably be 80,000 write-ins when all results are tallied.
Among the five boroughs of New York city, Manhattan (New York County) is the only one with a write-in tally so far. The percentage there is 1.9% of the total, or 11,421 write-ins. This news story has the presidential results by county, but obviously many counties have not finished the write-in tally because they show zero write-ins.
On November 8, various Mississippi voting rights groups asked for reconsideration in Republican National Committee v Wetzel, 24-60395. This is the case in which the Fifth Circuit struck down a Mississippi law that says postal ballots must be received in the elections administration office by five days after election day. The Fifth Circuit had interpreted the federal law defining “election day” to mean ballots must be received by the end of business on election day. The ruling was surprising and at odds with many other older court precedents.
Here is the brief asking for reconsideration.
New York was the only state with two presidential candidates on the ballot, a shocking fact that the New York mainstream news media have ignored for several months. Finally, on November 4, the day before the election, Spectrum News 1 covered the news. See this story. Spectrum News 1 is a group of television stations, all in western New York.
The first time the U.S. Supreme Court ever struck down a ballot access law was in Ohio in 1968, in Williams v Rhodes. The key fact in that case, weighing against Ohio, was that Ohio that year had been the only state with only two presidential candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court has said twice that if a ballot access law is so harsh that it is almost never used, it is almost certainly unconstitutional. So the fact of New York’s exclusionary ballot is of great legal significance, and it ought to be a fact of great public interest inside New York. Yet so far none of the state’s print newspapers has mentioned it.
On November 5, Kevin Hayes, the Constitution Party nominee for U.S. House in North Carolina’s Sixth District, received 103,053 votes, or 30.77%, in a two-race with a Republican.
This is the highest percentage for a minor party or independent candidate for U.S. House in North Carolina since 1900, when John E. Fowler, the Peoples’ Party nominee in the Third District, received 46.2%. That was also a two-way race.
Hayes received more votes, and a higher percentage of the vote, than any other Constitution Party nominee for U.S. House in the party’s history. The party’s previous percentage record for a U.S. House race had been 16.96% in a two-race in Alabama’s First District in 2010. The party’s best showing for U.S. House, as to the number of votes, had been Jaymn Germond’s 43,133 vote total in 2008 in Oregon’s Fourth District.
