A Kentucky Libertarian, David Patterson, has announced his intention to win the party’s U.S. Senate nomination for 2014 and to appear on the ballot. If he gets the required 5,000 signatures, he will be the first minor party or independent candidate to have petitioned onto the statewide Kentucky ballot in a midterm congressional year since 1978. The American Party had petitioned in 1978 for a U.S. Senate candidate.

Kentucky requires a party to receive 2% for President, to obtain qualified status. The only minor parties that have met this threshold in Kentucky in the last 80 years are the American Party 1968-1972, the Anderson Coalition Party 1980-1984, and the Reform Party 1996-2000. Because the qualification standard is rather difficult in practice, most of the time there are no qualified minor parties in Kentucky; and as a result, few minor party candidates, especially in midterm years.

The Kentucky Libertarian Party has only twice had a candidate for U.S. Senate on the ballot. Those two instances were in 1992 and 1996, and both times, the candidate’s name was listed on the same petition as the party’s presidential candidate, so there was no extra petitioning work in those years.

Last week, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who is now a Libertarian, endorsed Rob Sarvis, the Libertarian Party nominee for Governor of Virginia. That was enough to get a fairly short article about the endorsement in Richmond’s daily newspaper, the Times-Dispatch. See here.

Ohio holds local elections in November 2013; almost all of them are non-partisan. In two counties, a surprisingly large number of candidates failed to get on the ballot, because of flaws in their petitions. See this story about Franklin County, where 16 candidates failed; and this story about Madison County, where 9 candidates failed. Thanks to Steve Linnabary for the links.