Intrade.com has opened a market on the percentage of the vote that Gary Johnson will receive. See here. Intrade is a betting site, so people don’t express their fantasies; people who use it are trying to be as accurate as possible, because their pocketbook is affected.
It is likely that the Gary Johnson-Jill Stein debate, set for October 30 in Washington, D.C., will be postponed due to the upcoming east coast storm, which makes travel very difficult.
Two Progressive Party members of the Vermont House are running for re-election and they have no ballot-listed opponents. They are Mollie S. Burke of Brattleboro, and Sandy Haas of Rochester.
In 2010, Haas did have opponents but she won with 52.8% of the vote. Burke was unopposed in 2010.
In 2010, the Progressive Party elected five members of the Vermont legislature. Vermont has fusion, and this list only includes the Progressive Party nominees who chose to list the Progressive Party first on the ballot. In Vermont, when a candidate is nominated by two parties, the candidate indicates to the public his or her primary affiliation by choosing one party to be listed first on the ballot. This year, the Progressive Party has 13 candidates for the legislature whose primary loyalty is to the Progressive Party. The party will probably elect five or six of its nominees.
A Superior Court Judge in Alameda County, California, will hear Rubin v Bowen on Monday, October 29, at 9 a.m, in Oakland, 1221 Oak Street, Dept. 16. This is the lawsuit filed by the California Peace & Freedom Party, the California Libertarian Party, and the Green Party of Alameda County. This is the only lawsuit ever filed against any top-two system in which the chief issue is the voting rights of voters who wish to vote for minor party candidates in the election itself.
While it is true the Washington state Libertarian Party raised that issue in the federal case from Washington state, the voting rights issue was completely omitted from the oral argument in the 9th circuit. The only attorney who argued against the Washington state top-two case law in the 9th circuit devoted all his time (in the oral argument) to the freedom of association issue. The 9th circuit decision made little mention of the voting rights issue except to assert falsely that the U.S. Supreme Court had already disposed of that issue in 2000. The 9th circuit is obviously wrong about that, because Justice Scalia wrote the 2000 decision, and yet he dissented in the 2008 decision. What Scalia approved of in his decision in 2000 is obviously not the existing Washington state system.
The California lawsuit Field v Bowen did not concern the issue of a limited range of choices on the November ballot.
No tentative opinion in Rubin v Bowen has been issued yet.
Ballot Access News
October 1, 2012 – Volume 28, Number 5
| This issue was printed on white paper. |
Table of Contents
