The Libertarian Party has this compilation of election results for party members who ran for public elective office on November 5, 2013. The compilation also has results for 2013 elections earlier than November 5 at the top. The November 2013 results include fifteen members who were elected, and one who is in a run-off in December.
This article describes what the Minnesota Independence Party, and the Minnesota Libertarian Party, are doing to get ready for the 2014 election. Minnesota is the only state in which parties that are not ballot-qualified can sometimes get public funding, and the article mentions that the Libertarian Party and the Grassroots Party do qualify for some public funding. They have that status because they got over 1% for a statewide office in 2012. For the Libertarians, Gary Johnson got 1.20% for President. The Grassroots Party in 2012 polled 1.07% for Tim Davis for U.S. Senate.
On November 13, Pennsylvania State Senator Kim Ward (R-Greensburg) said she will co-sponsor SB 195, the ballot access reform bill. The Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition has been working diligently to increase the number of co-sponsors for this bill. When it was introduced in January 2013 it had five sponsors.
The bill lowers the number of signatures for independent candidates to match the number needed for Democrats and Republicans to get on primary ballots. For minor parties, it says a party is qualified, and entitled to nominate by convention, if it has approximately 4,000 registered members. If the bill were enacted, that would put the Constitution, Green, and Libertarian Parties on the general election ballot with no petitioning. That part of the bill is modeled on Delaware’s law.
On November 14, James Hall, the only independent candidate who filed a petition to be on the December 17, 2013 ballot for U.S. House in Alabama’s First District, asked the 11th circuit to hear his appeal. On November 13, a U.S. District Court in Alabama had denied him any relief. The case is Hall v Bennett.
UPDATE: here is a newspaper story about the court hearing. It was written before Hall decided to appeal.
Reince Priebus, national chair of the Republican Party, favors a national convention for his party that starts on July 14, 2016, according to this story. If that date is chosen, it will be the earliest presidential convention for either major party since 1992, when Democrats met July 13-16.
The same story says that some Republican Party leaders hope to persuade the state legislatures of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to all hold their presidential primaries on the same day, and that day would be very soon after the early primary states. The early primary states (states that have national party permission to hold the earliest primaries and caucuses) are Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
In 2012, Michigan held its primary on February 28; Ohio on March 6; Illinois on March 20; Wisconsin on April 3; Indiana on May 8. It would be rather surprising if these states could be persuaded to hold their primaries on the same day.
