Mike LaForest is a Green Party nominee for lower house of the Wisconsin legislature. On June 5, a Democratic Party official filed a challenge to his general election petition. LaForest needs 200 valid signatures and submitted 284. On June 10, the challenge was upheld, and LaForest was removed from the ballot. GreenPartyWatch has the details. There will be two candidates on the general election ballot, the Democratic incumbent and a Libertarian.

The Green Party is not a ballot-qualified party in Wisconsin, although it probably will regain its party status in the November 2014 election.

The Fourth Circuit has set the week of September 16-19 for oral arguments in The Greenville County Republican Party v State lawsuit. The exact date within that week will be set soon.

This is the case in which the Greenville County Republican Party seeks to close its primaries to exclude non-Republicans. The lower court had said the county party does not have standing. The party is in a strong position because it pays for its own primaries, when the election concerns city offices.

Last month, the Western Political Science Association gave the Charles Redd Award for the Best Paper on the Politics of the American West to political scientists Jack Citrin, Gabriel Lenz, and Douglas Ahler. The award was for their 2013 paper, “Do open primaries help moderate candidates? An experimental test on the 2012 California primary.”

That paper, which was published in 2013, concluded that California’s top-two primary in 2012 did not elect more moderate candidates, because the experimental evidence showed that most California voters were not informed about the ideology of candidates in their own districts.