On December 17, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley appointed Congressman Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate, to fill the vacancy created when Senator Jim DeMint said he will resign very soon.
As a result of Scott’s appointment, he will resign from the House. He has been a member of the House starting in 2010, representing the First District, which is centered on Charleston. There will thus soon be a special election to fill that House seat.
At last month’s election, the only two candidates on the ballot for U.S. House, Kansas 3rd district, were Republican incumbent Kevin Yoder and Libertarian nominee Joel Balam. The district includes Wyandotte County, Kansas, which contains Kansas City, Kansas. In Wyandotte County, Balam polled 18,589 votes, and Yoder received 19,853 votes.
In the district as a whole, Balam received 92,675 votes, whereas Yoder received 201,087. Balam’s share of the vote in the district, 31.5%, is the best showing by a Libertarian for U.S. House in the party’s history. Here is Balam’s web page. He appears to have active involvement with veterans groups, and a church group. His mother was Hispanic and some of the content on the web page is in Spanish.
Previous posts on this page in the last week said New York had finished its official vote tally. That was an error. New York normally never posts election returns on its web page until they are official, but this year New York did post election returns before they were official. According to David Wasserman, New York still has as many as 400,000 votes remaining to count.
The second half of this article in the Arizona Daily Sun contains some information about campaign spending for and against Arizona’s Proposition 121, the top-two initiative that lost last month. The story quotes Paul Johnson, chief proponent of the initiative, as saying that he should have built a broader coalition in favor of his idea. Johnson says that is why it passed in California. Actually, it passed in California because it was described so poorly on the California ballot, and because proponents outspent opponents 20:1.
The December 16 New York Times has this set of letters, commenting on minor and new political parties, and ideas for such parties. One letter discusses ballot access injustice, and one letter explains proportional representation. The other letters merely talk about the ideas that a desired new political party might promote.
