The Burlington Free Press has this brief story about the trial that starts on July 14 in state court, on the constitutionality of Vermont’s June petition deadline for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties. The trial is expected to last two days.
Huffington Post UK has this extensive interview with Caroline Lucas, the first and only Green Party nominee elected to the British House of Commons. Thanks to GreenPartyWatch for the link.
On July 12, California held a special election to fill the empty seat in the 36th U.S. House district. The only candidates on the ballot were Republican Craig Huey, who received 34,636 votes, and Democrat Janice Hahn, who received 41,585. This is not a final tally. The district has 342,492 registered voters.
If the top-two system had not been in force, there would also have been a Libertarian candidate on this ballot, and a Peace & Freedom Party candidate on this ballot, and some independent candidates on the ballot.
On July 12, the Third Circuit refused to reconsider its ruling in Constitution Party v Cortes. The original ruling had said the Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties of Pennsylvania don’t have standing to challenge any of these election law problems: (1) the failure of some counties to count write-ins, even though the law is clear that all write-in votes are valid; (2) the failure of the state elections department to tally the write-ins that were counted for Cynthia McKinney in November 2008 for President; (3) the law mandating that a party have registration of 15% of the state total before it can avoid petitions for its nominees; (4) the state’s unique system of charging up to $110,000 if a petition is submitted that lacks suficient signatures.
It is somewhat likely that new lawsuits will be filed soon, with slight variations, to make it logically impossible for any honest court to say there is a standing problem. The petition for rehearing had been pending since June 3.
On July 12, Ron Paul announced that he won’t seek re-election to Congress. He feels that his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination will be stronger if he only focuses on the presidential contest.
Minor party and independent candidates never had a better friend that Ron Paul. In four different sessions of Congress, he introduced a bill to outlaw restrictive ballot access requirements for federal office. Also, several times he introduced a bill requiring presidential candidates who receive public funding to participate in inclusive general election debates, should they become a nominee in the general election. Both bills received votes on the House floor in 1998. The ballot access bill got 67 votes and the debates bill got 81 votes.
