On May 2, Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller interpreted Nevada election law to mean that when the state holds a special U.S. House election on September 13, there will be no party nominees. Candidates will qualify for the ballot without regard to whether any particular party has nominated them. See this story. This will be Nevada’s first special election for U.S. House ever, so there are no precedents. Other states in which parties do not nominate candidates in special congressional elections are Georgia, Hawaii, and Texas. Those three states do let any candidate choose any party label.

Here is the Secretary of State’s schedule. It seems to indicate that the Secretary of State expects independent candidates to need a petition, whereas members of qualified parties do not. That is not logical, given that there will be no party nominees. In the other states in which there are no party nominees in special congressional elections, the ballot access hurdles for each candidate are equal and identical. But, because independents only need 100 signatures, it seems unlikely that any independent will sue. An earlier version of this post said they need 250, but the correct requirement is 100.

The Nevada schedule implies that each candidate will have a party label on the ballot.

The Hawaii bill to use Instant Runoff Voting in special elections, HB 638, will not pass this year, even though it had passed both houses. On the evening of April 28, the conference committee tabled the bill. The committee expressed concerns about the difficulty of re-programming the vote-counting machines.

Canada votes for Parliament on May 2. According to this story, early voting is substantially higher for this election than it was for Canada’s last parliamentary election. The story also says that the New Democratic Party is polling higher than the Liberal Party. Although the New Democratic Party has won control of certain provincial governments in the past, it is still considered to be a “third party”, behind the two major parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. The New Democratic Party has never won as many seats in Parliament as either of the two major parties.