Filing has now closed for Missouri primaries, which are held on August 3 this year. In the U.S. House race, 9th district, two Republicans filed, and two Libertarians, but no Democrats and no one from the Constitution Party. See this story.

To see the complete candidate list, see the Missouri Secretary of State’s web page here. There are two statewide races in Missouri this year. The two qualified minor parties, Libertarian and Constitution, will each have a U.S. Senate nominee. In the other statewide race, for Auditor, there will be a Libertarian, but no one from the Constitution Party. The Libertarian Party must poll 2% in one of the two statewide races or it will lose its qualified status. The Constitution Party need not worry about polling 2% for a statewide race in 2010, because it polled 2% for one of the statewide races in 2008, and in Missouri, when a party passes the vote test, it remains on for the next two elections.

The Green Party, which is not ballot-qualified, is petitioning for party status this year. That petition needs 10,000 signatures and is due in late July. If the petition drive succeeds, the Green Party will be able to nominate by convention for any partisan race. In Missouri, the name of the Green Party is “Progressive Party.”

Adam Kokesh has qualified for the New Mexico Republican primary ballot for the U.S. House race, district 3. He did so by collecting a number of additional signatures equal to 2% of the number of votes cast in the 2008 Republican primary for Governor in that district. He had already collected the same number of signatures before the preprimary convention.

If he had been recognized as having received 20% support at the party’s preprimary convention, he would not have needed that second batch of signatures. He got slightly more than 19.5% of the vote at that convention. New Mexico election code section 1-1-20, titled “Major Fractions” says, “In any place in the Election Code requiring counting or computation of numbers, any fraction or decimal greater than one-half of a whole number shall be counted as a whole number.” The Democratic Party of New Mexico this year interpreted that to mean that a candidate at the Democratic convention who got 19.69% of the delegate vote should be deemed to have received 20%, but the Republican Party does not follow the “Major Fractions” law.

Columbia, South Carolina is holding its regular election for city officers on April 6. One city council district, district 2, was not scheduled to have an election this year. However, the incumbent resigned abruptly on March 9. The city then set a special election for that district for April 6, giving candidates only 4 days to file.

On March 29, a federal lawsuit was filed to stop the special election. See this story. Plaintiffs charge that the election cannot be fair because potential candidates had such a narrow window in which to file. However, the basis for the federal lawsuit is that the city has changed its procedures for this special election and did not pre-clear those changes with the U.S. Justice Department. Absentee voting had already started for the regularly city election, and voters who already voted, who live in District 2, were given ballots that didn’t even include the special election.