On November 6, the Tea Party qualified as a party for the Florida ballot. It should not be confused with the Boston Tea Party, which was already a ballot-qualified party in Florida. See this story.
It is very easy for a group to qualify itself in Florida. Florida now has 32 qualified parties. The vast majority of them have never run a candidate for anything, because (except for president) the filing fees for candidates are so high.
On November 6, 2009, Ralph Nader again asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to rehear the 2004 case over whether it was proper and constitutional for that Court to order him to pay approximately $80,000 to the people who challenged his 2004 petition. In re Nomination Paper of Nader, 94 MAP 2008. Here is the succinct 5-page brief, which makes two points that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has never addressed: (1) the people who challenged Nader’s petition did so in a criminal conspiracy, and some of them have already pleaded guilty; (2) the U.S. Supreme Court, and lower courts, have established over the last 44 years that states cannot charge candidates for the costs of administering elections, except for the limited purpose of keeping ballots uncrowded.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has one new member, elected earlier this week, although she hasn’t taken the oath of office yet.
Here is the Libertarian Party’s response brief in Libertarian Party of New Hampshire v Gardner, the federal case over whether unqualified parties should be allowed to use stand-in presidential candidates on their petitions. Although it is short (only five pages), it has a good compendium of other federal court decisions that say in some areas of election laws, states may not discriminate against unqualified parties, relative to qualified ones. This is in response to the state’s brief, which seemed to argue that states are free to discriminate in all areas of election law, but only cited examples of cases in which unqualified parties need not be treated equally for purposes of having their members serve on election boards.
The Working Families Party of New York has hired Judith Kaye to review its practices regarding New York campaign finance laws. Kaye is in private practice now but she was recently a justice on New York state’s highest state court, the Court of Appeals. See this story.
On November 3, the two Virginia state legislators who were running for re-election were re-elected. They are Lacey Putney in the 19th district, and Watkins M. Abbitt in the 59th district.
Putney was re-elected with 64.1% of the vote. His only opponents were a Democrat, Lewis Medlin, who got 20.6%, and a Constitution Party candidate, Will Smith, who got 15.1%.
Watkins Abbitt was unopposed.
Another independent candidate, Gordon Helsel, lost to his Republican opponent, but placed ahead of his Democratic opponent. The vote in the 91st district was: Republican Tom Gear 48.3%, independent Gordon Helsel 32.6%, Democrat Sam Eure 19.0%.
