On November 30, one New Jersey legislator, Assemblymember John McKeon, had introduced A4271, to provide that when a vacancy occurs in the U.S. Senate, the Governor must appoint someone from the same party as the Senator who had just vacated the seat.

On December 8, another New Jersey legislator introduced a new bill on the same subject. This time the author is Assemblymember Joseph Cryan, who is state chair of the New Jersey Democratic Party. His A4339 says that no governor may ever appoint a U.S. Senator. Instead, the seat remains vacant until the state holds a special election to fill that vacancy. The bill number isn’t known yet. In the meantime, the earlier bill has not made any headway, even though the New Jersey legislature is in session.

The apparent reason for the interest in this subject is that soon New Jersey will have a Republican Governor being sworn in to office, and one of the U.S. Senators from New Jersey is 85 years old.

Louisiana, and approximately half the remaining states, will not let a candidate who qualifies under the independent candidate procedures list his or her party label on the ballot (except that Louisiana does permit labels for presidential candidates). In other words, the only party labels that ever appear on the Louisiana ballot (except for President) are the names of qualified parties. The ballot-qualified parties are Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Reform.

However, the Louisiana Secretary of State’s webpage recently started identifying the partisan registration of candidates who are not members of qualified parties. It has long been the policy that the state prints the word “Independent” on the ballot for candidates who are registered independents, and prints nothing for candidates are registered as members of a party that is not qualified. But, the Secretary of State’s webpage has gone back to elections starting in 2005, and identified the actual partisan registration of these “Other” candidates of the past. This will be useful to historians.

For example, in the 2007 gubernatorial election, a candidate named Belinda Alexandrenko was on the ballot with no label. But the webpage now shows that she was registered in the “Hope for America” Party. This improvement in the information on the Secretary of State’s webpage seems to have been caused by Randall Hayes, a Louisiana resident who always wanted to know which party these mysterious candidates listed as “Other” were really members of.

The North Carolina Supreme Court will soon be hearing Libertarian Party of North Carolina v State Board of Elections, a challenge to the state’s ballot access laws for minor parties, and also a challenge to other laws that injure minor parties. The Green Party is a co-plaintiff.

The Court wants all amicus curiae briefs in by December 23, 2009. There are many groups that intend to file on the side of the minor parties, although they are wishing the Court would give them a little more time. For a list of the groups that want to participate, see this story by Brian Irving.