The California Peace & Freedom Party will probably have three candidates on its primary ballot for Governor: Stewart Alexander of Riverside County, Carlos Alvarez of Los Angeles County, and Mohammad Arif of Kern County.

The other statewide nominees are likely to be: Lieutenant Governor, C. T. Weber; Secretary of State Mary Lou Cabral; Treasurer Debra Reiger; Controller Karen Martinez; Attorney General Bob Evans; Insurance Commissioner Dina Padilla; U.S. Senate Marsha Feinland.

Candidates in California partisan primaries may have a message included in the Voters Pamphlet if they pay for it, but the cost is high: $25 per word. C. T. Weber spent $450 to have a short message in the Pamphlet asking voters to vote against Proposition 14, the top-two election measure.

Rosa Clemente, Green Party vice-presidential nominee in 2008, will run for the New York State Senate in the Bronx. See this story.

Clemente is thus following in the footsteps of Pat LaMarche, who was the Green Party vice-presidential candidate in 2004. Like Clemente, LaMarche ran for another office just two years after running for vice-president. LaMarche ran for Governor of Maine in 2006 and polled 9.6%.

Cal Watchdog is sponsored by the Journalism Center of the Pacific Research Institute, to inform readers about California state government. The February 22 issue has this story about California’s Proposition 14, the top-two election law measure.

This is the first news story (as opposed to an op-ed) that mentions that Proposition 14 makes it more difficult for ballot-qualified parties to remain on the ballot. It does that by, in practical terms, eliminating the 2% vote test by which minor parties now remain ballot-qualified. The measure does not actually repeal the 2% vote test, but the 2% vote test is rendered meaningless by Proposition 14, because parties would no longer have nominees in mid-term years. The last California ballot measure to impose a top-two system, Proposition 62 in 2004, did not have that flaw. Proposition 62 lowered the registration test to one-third of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, to avoid eliminating any ballot-qualified parties. The people who wrote Proposition 14 were free to repeat that language from Proposition 62, but they chose not to do it, for reasons they have never explained.