Karen Ramsburg polled over 1,400 write-ins in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary on April 24, for U.S. House, 9th district. Because she received over 1,000 write-ins, and because the law requires a write-in candidate in a partisan primary to receive that many write-ins to be nominated (assuming the write-in candidate outpolls everyone else running for that same office in the same primary), she will be the Democratic nominee. No name had been printed on the Democratic primary ballot for that office.

If she had not won the Democratic primary, she was getting ready to become an independent candidate.

According to this story, anyone who signs a Texas petition this year for an independent candidate and who later votes in a partisan primary has (by the act of voting) disqualified his or her petition signature. However, the Secretary of State has told the Guadalupe County Elections Supervisor that all such signatures are presumed valid and will be counted, unless one of the major parties or one of its candidates files a challenge to such signatures.

On May 3, the Missouri Senate unanimously passed HB 1236. The bill is now through the legislature. It removes the typographical error in the law that required petitions to create a new ballot-qualified party to include the presidential candidate and the presidential elector candidates (if the group intended to run for those offices). This was an odd requirement, because the group didn’t need to list any of its nominees for other office on that same petition. No one ever intended the law to require the names of the presidential electors on the petition; that only existed because of a drafting error in 1993. It has taken almost 20 years to fix this irritating problem. Thanks to Ken Bush for the news, and also for persistently lobbying the legislature to achieve this result.