Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, Jr., has this essay on the chances for a strong presidential candidate in 2012 who runs outside the two major parties.
If you click the link and only the first paragraph is visible, try going to news.google.com and inserting “Two-Party System Begs for a Third”. That will probably produce the entire article.
The New Mexican, Santa Fe’s daily newspaper, has this interview with Gary Johnson, in which Johnson appears to open the door to seeking the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Unfortunately, Johnson apparently told the interviewer that the Libertarian Party has never polled as much as 1% of the vote for President, when actually the Libertarian Party polled 1.065% for President in 1980. Also the Libertarian Party has polled over 1% of the national U.S. House vote, for its combined vote for U.S. House nominees, in four elections: 2010, 2002, 2000, and 1998.
UPDATE: Politico picked up the story, and added some interesting content of its own. See here.
On November 23, the Eighth Circuit refused to rehear Libertarian Party of North Dakota v Jaeger, 10-3212, and also refused to amend its original October 2011 opinion, which erroneously said that when a party submits 7,000 valid signatures, it remains ballot-qualified indefinitely afterwards. The October 2011 decision had said North Dakota needs a primary vote test for minor party candidates, because otherwise the ballot would become too crowded because there is no other ballot access barrier. In truth, a party that submits 7,000 signatures is only on the ballot for one election, and it is then removed from the ballot unless it polled 5% for Governor or President (if the last election was a presidential election year) or Secretary of State (if the last election was a midterm year).
It is very odd for a court to fail to fix a factual error, when the factual error is pointed out in a rehearing request. Generally the panel denies rehearing, but issues an amended opinion fixing the error.
Most of the nation’s large-population states are having difficulty completing the redistricting process in time for the 2012 election. Among those states is California, which has an independent redistricting commission. Republican activists filed a referendum petition against the State Senate districts drawn by the commission. However, according to this story, the validity of the referendum petition won’t be established until mid-March 2012, after the process for candidates to file for the primary ballot has begun.
Proponents of the referendum petition say the new boundaries should not be implemented, even if the referendum petition’s validity hasn’t yet been determined. Proponents of the current boundaries disagree.
Ballotpedia has this article, with data on how much it cost to put 2010 initiatives on the statewide ballot of all the states that had statewide initiatives that year. The average cost to get an initiative on 2010 ballots was $3.29 per required signatures. Although 49 statewide initiatives qualified in 2010, only four of them got on the ballot without hiring a petition management company.
