The California Independent Voters Project has begun the steps to qualify a statewide initiative that would end public elections for political party office. The initiative would amend the California Constitution to abolish public elections for county central committee.

About half the states now have public elections for party office, and half don’t. In the states without elections, party meetings choose party officers. In California, under current law, each party is free to decide whether to use public elections for party office. The only ballot-qualified parties in California that don’t use public elections to choose party officers are the Libertarian and Americans Elect Parties. UPDATE: here is a copy of the proposed initiative. It also attempts to restore the blanket presidential primary used in California in 2000, in which all presidential candidates appear on a single ballot.

Here is a link to unofficial U.S. Senate election returns from the June 25 Massachusetts election. The tentative totals are: Markey (Democrat) 640,461; Gomez (Republican) 521,688; Heos (Twelve Visions) 4,513.

On June 25, President Obama gave a speech outdoors at Georgetown University, on the subject of climate change. Near the end of the speech, at 52 minutes and 44 seconds, he said he is “willing to work with anybody, Democrats, Republicans, independents, Greens, Libertarians, anybody.” As far as is known, this is the first time President Obama, since he has been president or even since he first became a presidential candidate, has publicly mentioned those political parties. Thanks to David Curtis for this news. Curtis watched the speech live on-line and wrote down that sentence. It takes a few days for presidential speech texts to appear on the whitehouse.gov web page.