On June 12, CNN broadcast an interview with former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. Venture said voters who really want to rebel ought to vote for Gary Johnson. See this story. Thanks to Starchild for the link.
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Here is a link to the Arizona Secretary of State’s web page, showing election returns for U.S. House, 8th district, special election. The ballot had Democratic, Republican, and Green Party nominees. The Democratic nominee is winning. The Green nominee has 2.48% (as of 8:40 p.m. Arizona time). By comparison, the Green Party had three U.S. House nominees in Arizona in November 2010, and they averaged 1.65% of the vote.
North Dakota held its primary on June 12, for the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Constitution Parties. North Dakota has an open primary, which means any voter can choose any party’s primary ballot. The primary ballots are all printed on a single sheet of paper, and the voter decides in the privacy of the voting booth which primary he or she will participate in. North Dakota law requires candidates for statewide office to poll at least 300 votes in the primary, in order to advance to the November ballot. All three Libertarian candidates for statewide office met the requirement.
The Constitution Party did not have any candidates, but the state still printed primary ballots for it. In theory, a write-in candidate could have been nominated, but no write-in candidate polled enough votes to be nominated.
The Libertarian Party was disadvantaged in this primary because the state printed the Libertarian Party primary ballot on the back of the ballot, whereas the other three parties were printed on the front. But that problem was overcome. Here is a link to the Secretary of State’s web page, giving election returns. Not all votes have been counted yet.
The South Carolina press has carried many stories about this year’s primaries, in which 250 major party candidates for legislature and county office were eliminated from the primary ballots due to a technicality. Some of these candidates are now running as independent candidates, and are working on their petition drives. The deadline is July 16. See this story about one particular candidate’s petitioning activity. The requirement is 5% of the number of registered voters, which is quite difficult.
South Carolina has only had one independent in the legislature in the entire period starting in 1896. He is Jim Cromer, who was elected as an independent in 1990 and re-elected as an independent three more times. Chances are, in the November 2012 election, several individuals will be elected as independent candidates, even though they will then consider themselves members of one of the two major parties.
Salon has this interesting article about Michigan’s U.S. House race, 11th district. That district went from being a safe seat for the Republican incumbent, Thad McCotter, into a district that is wildly unpredictable. McCotter failed to get 1,000 valid signatures on his petition to be on the Republican primary ballot, and then decided not to be a write-in candidate in the primary.