On April 19, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published the first of a two-part series about Pennsylvania’s unique policy of charging large amounts of money to candidates who file petitions to get on the ballot, and whose petitions are invalidated. Here is the first installment.
Mary Norwood said on April 18 that she will be an independent candidate this year for Chair of the Fulton County, Georgia, Commission. She will need 22,599 valid signatures by July 13. Fulton County is Georgia’s most populous county and contains most of the city of Atlanta. See this story.
County office in Georgia is partisan, but city office is non-partisan in Atlanta and in almost all Georgia cities. Norwood was elected to the Atlanta city council in 2001, and left the council in 2009 to run for Mayor. She placed first, with 46%, in the first round, but she narrowly lost the December 1, 2009 run-off to Kasim Reed. Thanks to Kyle Bennett for the link.
On April 19, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Citizens for Police Accountability v Browning, 09-861, the case over petitioning at the polls. The case had been filed by a group that was attempting to qualify a local initiative. The U.S. District Court had issued an order, letting the group put its petitioners within 25 feet of the polls, so that the petitioners could ask voters leaving the polling place to sign the petition. The basis for the order had been that because Florida lets exit pollsters stand 25 feet away, the law requiring petitioners to stand 100 feet away is a content-based restriction on speech. But the 11th circuit had reversed that order. Technically, the case only concerned whether an injunction should have been granted, not whether the law is unconstitutional.
On April 8, the North Carolina affiliate of the Service Employees International Union declared that it will attempt to qualify a new party for the North Carolina ballot this, to be called North Carolina First Party. The Washington Post, on April 19, has this story.
The SEIU says it has hired over 100 circulators to obtain the needed 85,379 signatures before the May 14 deadline. The Washington Post story erroneously says the petition deadline is June 1. The story confuses the deadline for turning in signatures to the counties, with the deadline for turning in signatures from the counties to the state.
The SEIU has 2,000,000 members nationally. Nurses, janitors, and bus drivers comprise the core of the union. The SEIU left the AFL-CIO in 2005 and is in a competing national alliance of labor unions called “Change to Win”, which contains six other nationally-organized unions. Andy Stern, outgoing president of SEIU, chose North Carolina for this effort because he wants the new party to run U.S. House candidates against the three North Carolina Democrats who voted against the recent health care bill. Those three Democrats are Mike McIntyre in the 7th district, Larry Kissell in the 8th district, and Heath Shuler in the 11th district. The latter two districts are swing districts.
New parties in North Carolina nominate by convention, not by primary. Therefore, the leadership of the new party, assuming it gets on the ballot, is free to choose not to run candidates for other partisan office. For instance, there is a U.S. Senate election in North Carolina this year, but the party has no interest in entering that race. Thanks to Bradley Jansen for the link.
If North Carolina had reasonable requirements for independent candidates for district office, it is likely that the SEIU would have chosen to sponsor independent candidates in each of the three U.S. House districts. However, the independent procedures in North Carolina for district office are so difficult, 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 began in 1901 in that state. Those requirements are under attack in two pending lawsuits, one in state court and one in federal court. They require the signatures of 4% of the number of registered voters in each district. In some districts, that is as many as 20,000 signatures. No candidate for U.S. House has ever overcome a requirement greater than 12,919 signatures, in any state (for Illinois, this statement only includes instances at which a petition was challenged; Illinois lets people on the ballot with fewer than the required number of signatures, if no one challenges).
A British YouGov Poll released on April 18, for the May 6 House of Commons election, shows these results: Liberal Democrat 33%, Conservative 32%, Labor 26%, other or undecided 9%. Much of that last 9% will go to the Independence Party, but the poll apparently didn’t include them as a separate category.
