During the period June-August 2010, Josue Larose, a 30-year old resident of Deerfield Beach, Florida, created 40 new political parties, and has registered them with the Florida Secretary of State.  He is state chair of all of them.  None of them is running any candidates this year.  Larose himself is a registered Republican.  Here is a short news story about him from 2009.  This original post on this subject said he formed 39, but the commenter below is correct; Larose created 40.

Larose earlier had created and registered 160 Political Action Committees.  He had been a write-in candidate for U.S. House, 19th district, in the April 13, 2010 special election, but according to official results, received zero votes in that race.  He had also run as a write-in candidate in a special election for State Senate, 28th district, in the August 4, 2009 special election, and had received seven votes.  He is a declared write-in candidate for Governor of Florida.  He says he is also a write-in candidate for U.S. Senate, but he can’t register as a write-in for that office, because Florida won’t let anyone run for two offices simultaneously.

The bylaws for his political parties provide that the party chair be escorted by armed bodyguards at all times and that the party provide him with a limo and a private jet.

The Florida Secretary of State’s office will probably ask the legislature next year to provide that when someone qualifies a political party, that person must be a registered member of that party.  Florida already requires nominees of political parties (for office other than President) to be registered members of the party that nominated the person, so this would be a minor change that would prevent anyone from keeping a current registration of more than a single political party (in other words, if a person qualifies one party and then leaves it to form another one, the qualification of the first party would be canceled).  Here is a story that mentions that Larose has formed 39 political parties.  Thanks to Darcy Richardson and Austin Cassidy for this news.

John Wayne Smith,the Libertarian Party’s Florida gubernatorial candidate, is starting to get some mainstream media coverage, over his ballot access woes.  See this story.  The Sunshine State News is an online newspaper headquartered in Tallahassee.

The Rhodes Cook Letter has collected primary election returns for 2010, for 33 states.  This data is in the August 2010 issue.  It shows that in primaries so far this year, approximately 16,160,000 voters have chosen to vote in Republican primaries, but only 13,191,000 voters have chosen to vote in Democratic primaries.  This data is always slightly inexact, because some states don’t release the number of voters who chose any particular party’s primary ballot.  Therefore, the calculation is based on the actual vote cast in each primary, generally for Governor or U.S. Senator or U.S. House-at-large, depending on which office had the highest vote total cast.

The 2010 primary participation so far is a sharp reversal from the 2008 presidential primaries, when 37,000,000 voters voted in Democratic primaries, but 21,000,000 in Republican ones.

The Rhodes Cook Letter is published six times per year.  Every issue consists of election data that is not available anywhere else.  It is written by Rhodes Cook, who is also the author of America Votes, the book published every two years by Congressional Quarterly that has election returns for all federal offices and all gubernatorial elections.  The Rhodes Cook Letter costs $99 per year and can be contacted at PO Box 574, Annandale Va 22003.