According to this story, Jon Green, organizer for the Connecticut Green Party for the last decade, will be leaving Connecticut and will work on getting Working Families Parties on the ballot in states that don’t now have such a party. The Working Families Party has been on the ballot in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont, at one time or another. However, its Delaware and Massachusetts units have gone off the ballot.
Two new election law bills in Arizona are: (1) SB 1429, which would abolish the presidential primary, but wouldn’t take effect until 2016; and (2) SB 1449, which would change the recall process to the system used in Wisconsin. The effect of filing a valid recall petition would be to force a special election for that particular office, and the incumbent being recalled would be a candidate in the special election if he or she wished. As in Wisconsin, there would be a partisan special primary election followed by a partisan special general election. Thanks to Frontloading HQ for the news about the presidential primary bill.
There seems to be no Arizona bill to provide that all qualified parties should be listed on the voter registration form. Last year the legislature passed a law that says only the two largest parties should be listed on the form. Voters who wanted to register into any other party, even a qualified party, would need to write it in. The Libertarian and Green Parties sued against that new law, and on February 13 the state answered the complaint and seems ready to defend the existing law.
The Independent Party is ballot-qualified in New Mexico. It polled over one-half of 1% of the presidential vote in New Mexico in 2008 for its nominee, Ralph Nader. Therefore, it remained ballot-qualified through the 2012 election.
The Independent Party is about to decide whether to change its name to the Justice Party. That would save the Justice Party the expense of doing its own petition drive in New Mexico. New Mexico already has a precedent that ballot-qualified parties may change their names. In 1979 it let the Prohibition Party change its name to the National Statesman Party. The Prohibition Party had been continuously ballot-qualified in New Mexico since 1976, when that name change was approved.
Sheri and Allen Rivlin have this article at Huffington Post, asking how many presidential candidates will be running in November 2012 outside of the two major parties. The article makes a good point when it criticizes the term “third party”, even though they use that term in the title of their article. However, the article is misleading when it ignores the Constitution Party, one of only three minor parties in each of the last four presidential elections to place its presidential nominee on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the election.
On February 13, the Hamilton County, Ohio, Board of Elections, voted on whether to appeal the Hunter lawsuit to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th circuit. This is the somewhat famous lawsuit on whether or not certain provisional ballots should be counted, in a November 2010 Juvenile Court partisan race. The Republican members of the Hamilton County Board of Elections voted to appeal, and the Democrats voted not to appeal. In Ohio, when a County Election Board has a tie vote, the Secretary of State breaks the tie.
The U.S. District Court had ruled on February 8 that the provisional ballots should be counted, even though they were cast in the wrong precinct, but in the correct building. The basis for the decision was that, even though Ohio provisional ballots are void if they are cast in the wrong precinct, the county had counted certain other provisional ballots that hadn’t been cast in the correct precinct.
The lawsuit has lasted so long already, the judicial office in question has been vacant for fifteen months. See this story.
