Montana voters elect a Clerk of the Supreme Court every six years, in a partisan election. The long-time incumbent, Ed Smith, a Democrat, is running for re-election this year. Generally no Republican runs for this office.

In 2006, there were three candidates on the ballot for this office: the incumbent; a Constitution Party nominee; and a Libertarian. The vote for the Constitution nominee in 2006 was 86,027 votes (24.74%), and the vote for the Libertarian was 37,972 (10.92%). This year again, no Republican filed in the primary for that office, and the Constitution Party is no longer on the ballot. But Mike Fellows, a Libertarian, filed and was nominated in the Libertarian primary.

After filing for the primary had closed, the Executive Director of the Montana Republican Party, Bowen Greenwood, filed as a write-in in the June Republican primary. He received 4,400 write-ins. But Montana has a very difficult barrier for write-in candidates to be nominated in a primary. They must not only outpoll any opponent, their write-in total must equal at least 5% of the vote cast in the last general election for the winning candidate. Greenwood needed at least 11,186 write-ins. Therefore, the Republican Party has no nominee. Fellows is running some radio ads and hopes to poll as much as one-third of the statewide vote.

As an aside, it seems somewhat irrational for any state to provide that voters choose the Clerk of the State Supreme Court. As far as is known, the only other state that has elected this position since World War II is Indiana.

At the close of normal business hours in Connecticut, on Monday, September 24, the Connecticut Supreme Court still hasn’t issued any order in Republican Party of Connecticut v Merrill, SC 19010. The hearing was on September 12. It is very odd that the Court hasn’t at least issued a brief order, so that the state can start printing ballots. Sometimes Courts release their conclusion and later they explain why. For example, the Arizona Supreme Court issued its conclusion a few weeks ago that the top-two open primary initiative doesn’t violate the single subject rule, but the Arizona court still hasn’t explained its reasoning.

The issue in the Connecticut case is which party should be listed first on the ballot. Connecticut should consider the idea of giving each candidate and/or each party an equal opportunity to be listed first on the ballot, a policy followed by approximately one-third of the states. The order could be determined either by a random drawing, or by a policy of rotation.

Until more information appears, the question of why the New York Independence Party chose no presidential nominee for the first time will go unanswered. The New York State Board of Elections had announced that ballot-qualified parties must choose their presidential nominees by September 10. Nevertheless, the New York Independence Party state committee went ahead with a meeting on September 22, and on the agenda for that meeting was the choice of a presidential nominee.

At the Albany meeting, State Chair Frank McKay proposed a resolution that the party not nominate any candidate for President, and that resolution passed. Nothing was said at the meeting, apparently, that at that point it was too late to choose a nominee. See this somewhat more detailed description of the meeting by Michael Drucker, a long-time officer in that party.