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.

Emory University Law Professor Michael Kang has a guest blog post at ElectionLawBlog, suggesting that it would be good policy to ease ballot access laws for the general election, and also to repeal “sore loser” laws.

Kang says that if it is true that party polarization is a problem in the United States, that problem can be eased if moderates are free to get on the general election ballot directly, even if they lose a party primary.  His examples from 2010 are Lisa Murkowski and Charlie Crist.  Even though Crist did not get elected as an independent, Kang says his presence in the U.S. Senate race caused the Republican nominee to moderate some of his stands.  And Murkowski probably has won, even though she had to do it the hard way, via a write-in campaign.

Kang does not mention the legal argument against “sore loser” laws, for Congressional elections, but that argument is powerful.  “Sore loser” laws, for Congress, are utterly inconsistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion U.S. Term Limits v Thornton, the decision that struck down state term limits laws for congressional elections.  The term limits decision said that states cannot keep candidates off the ballot, for Congress, just because they have some personal characteristic other than age, citizenship and residency on election day.  Yet state “sore loser” laws do keep such candidates off the November ballot.  Back when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “sore loser” laws, in 1974, the Court had not yet decided whether states are free to add to the qualifications to get on the ballot for Congress.  The term limits decision was released in 1995.  The logic of the 1995 decision overrides the 1974 decision, but the Court did not acknowledge that and has not wrestled with the contradiction since then.

In early 2011, Professor Kang’s scholarly article about “sore loser” laws will appear in Georgetown Law Journal.

At the November 2, 2010 election, Garrett County, Maryland voters elected a write-in candidate to seat 3 of the County Board of Commissioners.  The election is partisan.  The county was elected three at-large commissioners.  Write-in candidate Bob Gatto received 4,112 votes; Democratic nominee Bill Welch received 2,824; Republican nominee Dennis Glotfelty received 1,947 votes.  Two other declared write-in candidates received 170 votes.

Glotfelty had won the September 2010 primary but then had died of cancer only twelve days before the election.  Before he died, he asked voters to write-in Gatto, whom Glotfelty had defeated in the Republican primary.  Thanks to Jeff Becker for this news.