Syracuse, New York, held partisan city elections for city council on November 8, 2011. The Onondaga County Board of Elections web page says the official returns will be released by December 1. The unofficial returns show that, in the 4th district, Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins lost to Democratic/Working Families Party nominee Khalid Bey by 82 votes. The unofficial returns are: Bey 1,154; Hawkins 1,072.

The unofficial returns don’t give a breakdown of the Bey vote by party. The official returns will provide that data. Assuming that the official returns still show Bey the winner, chances are they will also show that no one party received as much as 50% of the vote, and that if the Working Families Party had cross-endorsed Hawkins, then Hawkins probably would have won.

This lengthy article about Americans Elect in the Savannah Morning News has interesting details about how Americans Elect is being financed. Also, the article reveals that Americans Elect now has 45,000 signatures on its Georgia petition, obtained with 30 petitioners. Assuming Americans Elect qualifies in Georgia, it will be the first party to have obtained statewide party status in Georgia by petition since 1996, when the Reform Party last did that type of petition.

The article says Americans Elect needs 51,849 valid signatures in Georgia. Actually, that is the number of signatures needed for a statewide candidate petition. The number of signatures Americans Elect needs is 50,334, because Americans Elect is doing the party petition. The party petition needs signatures equal to 1% of the number of registered voters in October 2010. But an independent presidential candidate petition would need 1% of the number of registered voters in October 2008, because that is the last election at which president was elected. Georgia had more registered voters in October 2008 than it did in October 2010.

The Georgia statewide party petition procedure has existed since 1986. It was used by the Libertarian Party and the New Alliance Party in 1988, and it was used by the Reform Party in 1996. Those are the only groups that have used that type of petition. Unfortunately, when a group successfully does the Georgia statewide party petition, it is only ballot-qualified for the statewide offices, not district or county offices.

In 1996, both the Constitution Party, and the Natural Law Party, attempted the party petition. Their petitions were rejected because a few of their notary publics also collected a few sheets of signatures. Georgia then invalidated all the notary public affirmations, which meant that practically all the petition sheets were invalid, even though the two parties probably had enough valid signatures.