Kristin Davis, who sought the New York Libertarian Party gubernatorial nomination earlier this year, but failed to obtain it, now says that she will petition onto the November ballot this year as the gubernatorial nominee of the Reform Party.  The Reform Party name has not appeared on the New York ballot before.  The New York state affiliate of the national Reform Party between 1995 and 2000 was the Independence Party.  Thanks to Tom Stevens for this news.

The Reform Party is still ballot-qualified in Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.  The New York Independence Party is also still ballot-qualified, but it cut its ties with the national Reform Party in 2000.

Kristin Davis is somewhat well-known in New York state, as the ex-madam who gained fame when Eliot Spitzer, who was elected Governor of New York in 2006, resigned after a sex scandal.

Ray Boyd, who had formally announced on May 8 that he would be an independent candidate for Governor of Georgia, has decided to suspend his petition drive.  He would have needed 44,089 signatures by July 13.

This is the second gubernatorial election in a row at which someone has set out to be an independent candidate for Governor of Georgia, and has not completed the petition.  John Dashler had a similar experience in 2006.

Petition requirements as difficult as Georgia’s function as a gargantuan filing fee that is applied on a discriminatory basis.  Neither Dashler nor Boyd was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get on the ballot.

On October 12, a trial will begin in U.S. District Court in Idaho Republican Party v Ysursa, 08-cv-165.  The issue is whether the party has a right to a primary process that excludes voters who are not in sympathy with the Republican Party.

The state recently presented an expert report by two political scientists.  The synopsis is:  (1) an original analysis of roll call voting data in the Idaho legislature suggests that political parties are extremely ideologically cohesive and quite strong.  There is little overlap – if any – between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat in the legislature; (2) there is no evidence of a Trojan Horse candidate winning an election and serving as a Republican-in-name-only in the Idaho legislature; (3) the Idaho legislature is already extremely polarized; this could be exacerbated if the state moved to a closed primary system.”

It will be interesting to see if the Idaho Republican Party uses the data of political scientist Boris Shor to rebut the state’s conclusion from the state’s own evidence.  Shor studied polarization in all 50 state legislatures, over the last 15 years.  Although he did not draw many conclusions about his own data, another political scientist, Seth Masket, did review the Shor data.  Masket concluded that there is virtually no correlation between openness of primary system and polarization.  For example, the Shor data shows that Washington state has had the nation’s 2nd-most polarized legislature, and Washington has used either a blanket primary, or a top-two primary, for most of the last 15 years.

The state’s expert report does not explain why the Idaho legislature would become more polarized if the state had a closed Republican primary.  If the answer is that different types of people would be chosen in the Republican primary if that primary were closed, that would contradict the state’s legal argument that the Republican Party is not injured by the open primary because the same people get nominated with either type of primary.  UPDATE:  this story describes the evidence presented so far by the Idaho Republican Party.