New York fills the vacant 9th district U.S. House seat on September 13. Three candidates are on the ballot: Democrat David Weprin, Republican Bob Turner, and Socialist Workers nominee Christopher Hoeppner. All three candidates debated on Queens Public TV on August 23. The debate will be broadcast on four dates: (1) Friday, September 2, at 7 p.m.; (2) Friday, September 9, at 7 p.m.; (3) Sunday, September 11, at 10 p.m.; (4) Tuesday, September 13, at 10 a.m.
Pennsylvania Ballot Access activists have posted this 5 and one-half minute you tube, on how activists can lobby their state legislators for better ballot access laws. The video is most useful to people in Pennsylvania, but it is also valuable for other states with bad ballot access laws.
The two recent statewide general elections in Pennsylvania with no minor party or independent candidates (referred to in the film) were 2006 and 2010. In 2010, Pennsylvania was one of only five states that had a statewide partisan election with a Democratic-Republican monopoly. The others in 2010 were Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, and Washington.
Although Illinois has drawn new U.S. House district boundaries for the 2010’s decade, those boundaries are under legal attack and could conceivably change before the March 2012 primary. On August 26, a U.S. District Court in Chicago ruled that signatures collected by candidates seeking a place on the primary ballot in 2012 are valid, even if the boundaries later change. See this story.
This ruling may help the Illinois Green Party, which is fighting to retain its qualified status in over a dozen U.S. House and state legislative districts. Illinois says a party that polled 5% for a partisan district office in one election is then qualified to be on the ballot automatically in the next election for that district office, even if the party is not qualified statewide. However, even though the Green Party has this status in over a dozen districts from the 2010 election, elections officials may eliminate the party’s status on the grounds that the boundaries of those districts changed.
A fairly new blog is “A New Kind of Third Party”, which can be seen at this link. http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com.
On August 25, the Washington state Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian Parties filed their rebuttal briefs in Washington State Republican Party v Washington State Grange, 11-35125. All the briefs are now in. The 9th circuit will probably hold an oral argument in this case in the next few months. This is the lawsuit, originally filed in 2005, that challenges the top-two system in Washington state. The case has been up to the U.S. Supreme Court and back down again.
Here is the Republican brief; here is the Democratic brief; here is the Libertarian brief.
