Jill Stein, frontrunner for the Green Party presidential nomination, has now raised at least $5,000 in matchable donations from thirteen states. However, she won’t qualify for primary season matching funds unless she meets that goal in at least twenty states. The two latest states in which she has met the goal are Oregon and Michigan.
The Coalition for Free & Open Elections (COFOE) will hold its annual board meeting on July 15, Sunday, in Baltimore, at the Inner Harbor Holiday Inn, 301 W. Lombard Street, at noon. The meeting will be in the Harbor 2 Room. The Green Party is kindly making this room available to COFOE. The national convention of the Green Party will meet on the day before, Saturday, July 14, to choose a presidential and vice-presidential nominee, in the Chesapeake Ballroom of the same hotel. Then, on Sunday morning, the national committee of the Green Party will meet at 9 a.m. in the Harbor 2 Room, but that meeting is expected to be finished by noon, making the space available for the COFOE meeting.
COFOE was formed in 1985, and is a loose coalition of most of the nation’s nationally-organized parties, other than the two major parties. Also included are organizations that are interested in the legal problems of political parties and independent candidates. The COFOE board currently includes representatives from the Conservative Party, the Constitution Party, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Reform Party, the Socialist Party, the Working Families Party, Free & Equal, and the Committee for a Unified Independent Party.
Anyone is free to attend the board meeting.
California is one of a handful of states in which political parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties use government primaries to choose party officers. On June 20, San Francisco Elections Director John Arntz placed two slips of paper inside a jar, each containing the name of one candidate for Peace and Freedom Party County Central Committee. He then put his hand in the jar and drew out one name, and proclaimed that person the winner. This was done to break a tie. Each of the two candidates had polled 118 votes. See this story.
The story does not include the detail that the Peace & Freedom Party has determined that it will seat both candidates, notwithstanding the tie-breaking event. The party is free to do this, because the election was for party office, not public office. California parties are not required to elect party officers in the primary; but the Peace & Freedom Party, along with the Green Party, and the American Independent Party, do choose their party officers that way.
Newspapers in Tennessee have run stories recently about the Green Party and the Constitution Party nominees for public office. For example, see this story. Both parties were put on the ballot by a U.S. District Court, in February 2012. They are the first two parties in Tennessee to be recognized since the period 1968-1972, when the American Party was on the ballot.
The Green Party has nominated six candidates for Congress, and five for the State House. The Constitution Party has only nominated one candidate, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The twelve candidates from these two parties could conceivably be removed from the November ballot, if the state succeeds in persuading the 6th circuit to reverse the decision of the U.S. District Court.
Al Jaeger, North Dakota Secretary of State, has asked Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to decide whether Roland Riemers may remain on the November 2012 ballot as the Libertarian nominee for Governor. See this story. Due to a paperwork error, the Libertarian running for Lieutenant Governor was kept off the Libertarian primary ballot, so the party has no Lieutenant Governor nominee. In North Dakota primaries, candidates for Governor run separately from candidates for Lieutenant Governor. But in the general election, they run as a team.
In Wisconsin in 2010, the Libertarian Party had a candidate in the primary for Lieutenant Governor, but not for Governor. Wisconsin election officials permitted the Lieutenant Governor candidate to be on the ballot in November, even though Wisconsin has the same system, in which Governor and Lieutenant Governor run separately in primaries but as a team in November.
Also, in 1986, Illinois Democrats had a nominee on the November ballot for Lieutenant Governor, but no one for Governor, and that was permitted. The Democratic ticket of no one for Governor and someone for Lieutenant Governor received 6.6% of the November 1986 vote. That vote was essential for keeping the Democratic Party on the ballot. If the ticket had polled under 5% of the vote, the Democratic Party would have lost its status as a qualified party. The reason Democrats had no candidate for Governor that year was that the winner of the Democratic primary, Adlai E. Stevenson III, resigned from the Democratic ticket rather than run in November teamed with a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche.
If the North Dakota Libertarian Party has no nominee on the November 2012 ballot for Governor, the only way it can remain ballot-qualified will be if Gary Johnson, the presidential nominee, polls at least 5%.
