Many centrist major party politicians will attend the December 13 meeting in New York City of “No Labels”, a group dedicated to persuading the two major parties to work together more cooperatively. See this story.
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On December 13, the U.S. Supreme Court released the results of its December 10 conference. At that conference, the Court sent Clemons v U.S. Department of Commerce, 10-291, back to the U.S. District Court, and told the U.S. District Court to dismiss the case for want of jurisdiction.
This is the case in which voters from certain states had argued that “one person, one vote” principles are being violated by the fact that some U.S. House districts have almost twice as much population as certain other districts. For instance, Montana and Wyoming each have one seat, but Montana’s population is almost twice Wyoming’s population. The plaintiffs had also argued that the only method for curing this problem is to increase the size of the U.S. House. The Supreme Court’s action today seems to mean that the Court feels this case is one which the courts could not even legitimately entertain.
Artur Davis, a member of the U.S. House from Alabama who did not run for re-election this year, has this op-ed in the Montgomery Advertiser, saying Alabama needs a new “independent party” to take control of state government. Davis is a Democrat. Thanks to ThirdPartyWatch for the link.
Alabama laws are so hostile to minor party and independent candidates, Alabama is one of only five states that had a Democratic-Republican monopoly on the November 2010 ballot. The others were Washington, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New Mexico.
No group or candidate has completed the 3% (of the last gubernatorial vote) for statewide Alabama office since 2000. The 3% law has been in effect continuously since 1998. Presidential independent candidates need not comply with the 3% petition, but get on the ballot with 5,000 signatures.
Georgia held a a statewide run-off election on November 30, 2010, for the statewide positions for which no candidate had received at least 50% on November 2. The most important office on the run-off ballot was for Justice of the State Supreme Court, a non-partisan race.
Whereas 2,090,164 voters had cast a ballot for that office on November 2, only 263,565 votes were cast for the same office on November 30. That number is only 4.55% of the number of registered voters in Georgia.
As has already been reported, the 2010 Connecticut gubernatorial race is an instance at which a minor party, by having nominated one of the major party nominees, seems to have changed the identity of the winner. The official Connecticut gubernatorial vote in 2010 is: Republican Tom Foley 560,874 votes; Democrat Dan Malloy, 540,970 votes on the Democratic line and 26,308 votes on the Working Families Party line (there were also 17,629 votes for the Independent Party nominee, Thomas Marsh). Malloy’s victory margin of 6,404 votes is smaller than the number of votes Malloy received on the Working Families line.
This is the first time that a minor party, engaged in cross-nomination of a major party nominee, seems to have tipped the outcome in any gubernatorial or U.S. Senate race, anywhere in the country, since the New York 1994 gubernatorial election. In that 1994 election, Republican nominee George Pataki only received 2,156,057 votes on the Republican line, a smaller number than the number of votes for Mario Cuomo on the Democratic line, 2,272,903. But the Conservative Party’s nomination of Pataki, which gave him another 328,605 votes, put Pataki over the top. Cuomo had the nomination of the Liberal Party, and Pataki also had the nomination of the Tax Cut Now Party, but the vote total for those two parties was relatively small and did not affect the identity of the winner.