It has been over a month since the Jill Stein campaign applied for primary season matching funds, and the Federal Election Commission still hasn’t told the campaign if the submission is sufficient.
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According to Scotusblog, the U.S. Supreme Court may accept some cases for review at the end of August. See here. Normally the Court doesn’t do such things during its summer recess.
Connecticut election law, sec. 9-249a, says “The names of the parties shall be arranged on ballots in the following order: (1) the party whose candidate for Governor polled the highest number of votes in the last-preceding election; (2) Other parties who had candidates for Governor in the last-preceding election, in descending order, according to the number of votes polled for each such candidate.” At the November 2, 2010 gubernatorial election, the Republican Party polled 560,874 votes; the Democratic Party polled 540,970 votes; the Working Families Party polled 26,308 votes; and the Independent Party polled 17,629 votes.
Notwithstanding the law, the Secretary of State, Denise Merrill, a Democrat, ruled last year that the Democratic Party should be listed first on 2012 and 2014 ballots. Because the Working Families Party nominee and the Democratic Party nominee were the same individual, Dan Malloy, the Secretary of State says the Democratic Party is the party whose candidate for Governor received the most votes. Malloy was elected, but he would have lost except that the Working Families Party nominated him, and thus he received votes under both the Democratic label and the Working Families label. Of course, by the Secretary of State’s logic, one could argue that the Working Families Party has an equal right to the top line.
In New York, which also uses fusion, the order of parties is also determined by the gubernatorial vote for each party, but New York determines the order by looking at the vote for each party, and not the cumulative vote for any particular candidate who has the nomination of more than one party.
On August 9, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit over the order of parties on the ballot. It is Republican Party of Connecticut v Merrill, superior court, Hartford, 027726. The case has a hearing on August 14, Tuesday. The Secretary of State has said publicly that the hearing date is very inconvenient, since August 14 is primary day in Connecticut. The Secretary of State says the Republican Party should have filed this case earlier.
As reported earlier, the New Mexico Secretary of State earlier determined that Jon Barrie does not have enough valid signatures on his petition to be on the November ballot. He is the U.S. Senate nominee of the Independent American Party. If he gets on the ballot, he will be the first candidate on a general election ballot for U.S. Senate in New Mexico, other than the Democratic and Republican nominees, since 1996.
This story explains that the state checked his petition using an automated program that automatically rejects all signatures unless they are an exact match with that voter’s name on the voter registration rolls. Thus, it rejected a signer whose name was “Jean” on one document, but “Jeanne” on the other; and it rejected a signer whose name was “Chris” on one document and “Christopher” on the other document. The story does not say if Barrie will sue to get on the ballot. Thanks to Doug Carver for the link.
On August 11-12, the Reform Party national convention was held in Philadelphia. The delegates chose Andre Barnett for President. Here is his campaign web page. Here is the wiki page about him. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York. The Reform Party is ballot-qualified in Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. However, the Kansas Reform Party already nominated someone else for President this year.
The vice-presidential nominee is Ken Cross of Arkansas.