New Jersey State Senator Peter Barnes (D-Middlesex) has introduced SCR 71, to provide for an elected Attorney General. New Jersey is one of seven states in which the voters don’t choose the Attorney General.
If the bill is enacted this year, the voters would vote in November 2014 on whether to change the State Constitution to provide for such elections.
David Catania, who has been a member of the Washington, D.C. city council since 1997, will run for Mayor as an independent this year. See this story.
He was first elected in a special election in 1997 as a Republican to an at-large seat. Because the election was a special election, parties did not have nominees. Catania faced two Democrats and a Socialist Workers Party candidate, and won with 43% of the vote.
He was re-elected as a Republican in 1998 and 2002. In those races, he was helped by a D.C. election law that lets the voters choose two at-large members in any single election year, but forbids any party from running more than one nominee. The intent of this law is to prevent one party from winning all the Council seats. In 2004 he left the Republican Party and became an independent. He was re-elected as an independent in 2006 and 2010.
On March 8, the Georgia Libertarian Party, which nominates by convention, chose its 2014 candidates. The party is on the ballot for all the statewide offices, but not the district or county offices. The party nominated Amanda Swafford for the U.S. Senate seat. She has twice been elected to the Flowery Branch city council. The last time Georgia held a U.S. Senate election, in 2010, the Libertarian nominee received 2.69%.
On March 10, Roger Roots entered the Montana Libertarian primary for U.S. Senate. Since no one else filed, he will be the nominee. See this story about all the candidates who filed for the Montana seat. In 2012, the Libertarian nominee for the other Montana U.S. Senate seat polled 6.56% of the vote in a race in which no one received a majority.
Both the Georgia and Montana U.S. Senate seats are open; incumbents Max Baucus (Democrat) and Saxby Chambliss (Republican) aren’t running for re-election.
On March 10, Steven Linnabary filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court, hoping to win a court order that he should be restored to the May 6 Libertarian primary ballot. State ex rel Linnabary v Husted, 14-0359. He is running for Attorney General.
The issues are whether his primary petitions are invalid because the circulators didn’t fill out the “employer” blank, and whether the person who filed the challenge to Linnabary’s petition is entitled to object, given that he had never voted in a Libertarian Party primary in the past and had never voted for a Libertarian in a general election. The law says that an objector to a primary petition must be a member of that party.
Linnabary filed in State Supreme Court because he was not a plaintiff in the federal case, in contrast to the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Earl. So the issue of petition validity for Libertarian statewide candidates is now pending in two courts, U.S. District Court and the State Supreme Court. Persons interested in this issue may want to read Linnabary’s brief especially because it contains the 18-page finding of the Secretary of State’s hearing officer on why he recommended removing the candidates. His finding says past directives of the Secretary of State saying petitions should not be invalidated just because the circulator didn’t include his or her employer aren’t binding. His Report says these past directives only applied to particular initiative petitions and they don’t have lasting effect.
Here is a Public Policy Poll for the special election for U.S. House in Florida’s 13th district. The poll shows most respondents have already voted. The remainder will vote on Tuesday, March 11. For voters who have already voted, the results are: Alex Sink, Democrat, 52%; David Jolly, Republican, 45%, Lucas Overby, Libertarian, 3%.
The poll also shows results for voters who haven’t voted yet: Jolly 45%, Sink 41%, Overby 10%, undecided 4%.
The race also has one declared write-in candidate, Michael Levinson, who has been campaigning and advertising, but the poll does not include him.
