The Tennessee Green Party has placed Howard Switzer on the November 2010 ballot as an independent candidate for Governor. Tennessee has no other statewide races this year.

If the pending ballot access lawsuit wins, it is very likely the court will order that Switzer be put on the ballot as the Green Party nominee, instead of being labeled as an independent. The lawsuit was filed on January 23, 2008, in U.S. District Court. It has moved slowly, but all the evidence and the briefs have been submitted. The other two parties in the lawsuit, the Constitution and Libertarian Parties, have nominees for various district office this year on the ballot as independents, but they aren’t running anyone for Governor.

Dan Quayle has this op-ed in the Sunday, April 4, Washington Post. Thanks to Nancy Hanks for the link.

Quayle repeats the cliche that a minor party or independent candidate always injures the major party closest (ideologically) to that minor party or independent candidate. Social science and historical research substantially rebuts that idea.

Dan Ariely’s best-selling book “Predictably Irrational” describes the findings of research that describes how individuals choose, when there are three choices. “Predictably Irrational” says that if two of the three choices are markedly similar in some way, but one of those two choices is obviously superior to the other similar choice, that superior choice then gains a significant advantage over the third choice, that is, over the choice that is not similar to either of the other two.

A real-world example is the 1948 presidential election. Pollster Samuel Lubell, who later became a political scientist, learned that Henry Wallace actually helped Harry Truman. Conventional wisdom, including the Quayle op-ed, would predict just the opposite. Lubell’s book “The Future of American Politics” explains how Wallace helped Truman by running against him.

The Communist Party understood this, and in 1936 ran its own presidential candidate, Earl Browder, even though the party in 1936 was very much in favor of Roosevelt’s re-election. The Communist Party’s campaign was run to boost Roosevelt, even though superficially the party was “taking votes away” from Roosevelt.

Indiana Circuit Court Judges are elected on a partisan basis. Indiana holds its primary this year on May 4. Two candidates are on the Democratic ballot in Lake County for Circuit Court Judge. However, a lawsuit has been filed to remove one of them, Alex Dominguez, from the ballot, because he failed to sign his declaration of candidacy form. However, he did sign on the back of the form, in a space that asks the candidate to confirm awareness of the campaign finance laws. See this story in the Post-Tribune of Merrillville, Indiana.

Because the county probably wants to print the primary ballots very soon, this case will be decided quickly. Indiana does not permit write-ins in primaries, so if Dominguez is removed from the primary ballot, only one candidate will remain on the ballot, and he will be the nominee automatically.