Gary Bryant, Libertarian Party candidate for California Assembly, 3rd district, has produced his own radio ad against Proposition 14, the top-two ballot measure on the June 8 ballot. He uses his own voice, and the ad lasts one minute. It cost him $205 to have it air four times on Monday, June 7, on KNCO, 830 on the dial, in Grass Valley, California.
Socialist Action has nominated a candidate for U.S. House in Connecticut’s First District, and is petitioning to place him on the ballot. He is Christopher Hutchinson. He needs almost 3,000 valid signatures by August 4.
If he gets on the ballot, he will be the first Connecticut congressional candidate of a party that holds itself out as advocating socialism, since the Communist Party had a candidate on the Connecticut ballot for U.S. House in 1982.
Socialist Action was formed decades ago by people who had been members of the Socialist Workers Party, but who left that party. It has never run a presidential candidate of its own, and it has almost never had any candidates for any partisan office. It is headquartered in San Francisco.
On June 4, U.S. District Court Judge David G. Larimer issued an opinion in Fox v Paterson, 10-cv-6240L. The case concerns whether New York must hold a special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat, 29th district. The seat has been empty since March 2010.
The judge ruled that the U.S. Constitution gives Governors a great deal of latitude in when to call special U.S. House elections. Therefore, the Governor must arrange for a special election that will be no later than November 2, 2010. The Governor had already promised to do that, so the outcome is a victory for the state. The Governor had said it would cost too much to hold the special election any sooner, and that furthermore some of the counties in the 29th district are in the process of buying new vote-counting machines and that process can’t be finished any sooner than November 2.
It seems odd that neither the Governor, nor the court, decided to hold the special election on September 14, when the entire state is holding primary elections.
Brad Smith of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, has been diligently seeking to qualify as an independent candidate for the U.S. House since September 2009. He wants to be on the November 2010 ballot in the 5th district. The law requires him to submit 18,123 valid signatures by June 10. He has submitted 10,000 signatures so far, of which approximately 7,500 have been validated.
No one has ever qualified as an independent candidate for U.S. House in North Carolina in the entire history of government-printed ballots, which have existed in that state since 1901. On June 4, Smith filed to intervene in Greene v Bartlett, the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in 2008 to overturn the North Carolina ballot access law for independent candidates for U.S. House. The case is awaiting a decision.
Smith’s intervention will strengthen the lawsuit.
The Los Angeles Times has this op-ed, criticizing California’s Proposition 14, written by Mike Feinstein, Green Party leader and former Mayor of Santa Monica.
This is not in the print version of the Los Angeles Times, but is on the web. This is the first content in that newspaper that is critical of Proposition 14, since February 2009. Back in February 2009, virtually no one was aware of the measure. Meanwhile, virtually every news article in the Times has been heavily slanted in favor of Proposition 14; the newspaper has editorialized several times in favor of Proposition 14; and the newspaper has run op-eds in favor of Proposition 14.
