The Freedom Socialist Party will hold a national convention July 9-12 at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington.
The Freedom Socialist Party has not run a candidate for any partisan office since 2004, when it had a candidate on the Oregon ballot for state representative in the 45th district. That candidate, Jordana Sardo, polled 8.9%.
Stewart Alexander, the Socialist Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008, has this commentary on California’s Proposition 14 in Indybay, the voice of the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center. It ran on April 9.
Law Professor Mark R. Brown has this op-ed in the April 10 Columbus, Ohio Dispatch. The op-ed concerns the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Doe v Reed, which is being argued on April 28. Brown says that a recent amicus curiae brief filed by Ohio’s Attorney General, and co-signed by 17 other states, is wrong. The amicus argues that the names and addresses of people who sign petitions must be made public, or forged signatures will not be uncovered. Brown rebuts the amicus.
Brown is the attorney who has filed three of the four pending ballot access cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Brown authored the cert petitions in the Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi ballot access cases. The fourth ballot access case before the U.S. Supreme Court is from Florida. The Court has not yet said whether it will hear any of these four cases.
Christina Tobin has this op-ed in the Sacramento Bee of April 11, on the subject of California’s Proposition 14, the top-two ballot measure.
On April 8, the Libertarian Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal in Libertarian Party v Dardenne. The issue is whether Bob Barr should have been on the November 2008 ballot in Louisiana. The party submitted its presidential elector paperwork on time, from the viewpoint of the Governor’s Emergency Proclamation, but late, from the viewpoint of the Secretary of State’s rules. Here is the brief, which not only presents the ballot access issue, but the separate issue of whether the case should be considered moot or not, and a third issue of whether the state should have accepted service without the need for the party to pay a process server.
The U.S. Supreme Court now has four ballot access cases, and should decide before June whether to hear any of them. They are the Florida case on petitioning at the polls, and the cases for presidential ballot access in 2008 from Mississippi and Louisiana, and the Alabama case over the number of signatures for an independent for Congress.
