The Hawaii State Senate that convenes early next year will have 24 Democrats and one Republican. See this story. Thanks to Sam Harley for the link.
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In the aftermath of the November 2010 election, 35 states plus the District of Columbia have at least one ballot-qualified party other than the Democratic and Republican Parties. This is the highest such number, immediately after a midterm election, for any election since 1918.
The 15 states without a ballot-qualified party (statewide), other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, are: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. New Mexico is ambiguous; it has two parties that are ballot-qualified for President in 2012 but they cannot run nominees for office other than President without submitting petitions for them. Connecticut is also somewhat ambiguous, because qualified status is determined office-by-office, but there are four minor parties that are now qualified for at least some statewide offices.
Newly elected Alabama State Senator Robert Cameron “Cam” Ward says he will re-introduce his ballot access bill in 2011. Ward was a state representative between 2003 and this year. In his last term in the House, he introduced a bill to lower the non-presidential petitions from 3% of the last gubernatorial vote, to 1.5% of the last gubernatorial vote.
The 2009 bill passed the House committee that handles election law bills, but it made no further headway. The 2009 bill also had a drafting error. It had been intended to include both independent petitions, and petitions for new parties, but it only covered independent candidates. The 2011 bill will not contain this error. Ward was elected to the Senate this month from the 14th district. He had no opponent in the general election and is a Republican. He represents the area south of Birmingham. Thanks to Joshua Cassity, chair of the Alabama Constitution Party, for this news.
In 2006, a group of seasoned campaign professionals, including both Republicans and Democrats, proposed to create a “third force” in the 2008 presidential election which would be centrist. The group called itself Unity08, and proposed an on-line “national presidential primary” to choose an independent presidential candidate, who might very well be a member of one of the two major parties, but who would run in the general election independently of the two major parties. The rules also said that the vice-presidential nominee should not be of the same party affiliation as the group’s presidential nominee.
The group proposed to handle ballot access for its future ticket by qualifying Unity08 as a qualified party in most of the states. The group actually qualified itself as a party in Florida and Mississippi, but made no further headway because the Federal Election Commission ruled that no one could give Unity08 more than $5,000. This made it impossible for the group to raise enough money to carry on more ballot access work. That hostile FEC ruling was upheld by a U.S. District Court on October 16, 2008, but it was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, on March 2, 2010.
Now some of the founders of Unity08, along with new backers, plans to put the plan into operation for 2012. The group has a sketchy web page, http://americanselect.org.
Washington, D.C., held a partisan election for Mayor last week. The results: Vincent Gray, Democrat, 90,552 votes; write-ins, 27,874 votes; Statehood Green Party nominee Faith (a person with a one-word name) 1,341 votes; independent Carlos Allen 2,042 votes; Socialist Workers Party nominee Omari Musa 659 votes.
The vast majority of write-ins are for Adrian Fenty, who is the incumbent Mayor. He was defeated for re-nomination in the September 2010 Democratic primary, but lots of voters chose to vote for him in November.