Andre Sandford, a member of the American Independent Party, appears to have placed second in the March 5, 2024 California primary for Assembly, 18th district, in Oakland. The ballots are almost all counted and he has 4,389 votes. The only Democrat in the race has 73,040 votes; the two Republicans have 4,389 votes and 4,004 votes.

Assuming the final vote count holds up, he will be the first minor party member since the California top-two system started to reach the general election ballot in a race with both a Republican and a Democrat also running. This sentence is true for congressional races and partisan state offices. It does not relate to the presidential election, because top-two does not affect presidential elections.

Here is Sandford’s campaign website.

On March 16, the South Carolina Workers Party, which is ballot-qualified, nominated Claudia De la Cruz for president. She is also the presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and also very likely to be the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party of California.

This is the first time the South Carolina Workers Party has ever nominated anyone for president. In the past it was the Labor Party, and even when it was under its old name, it never before entered a presidential race.

De la Cruz is the first Marxist presidential candidate ever to be on a government-printed ballot in South Carolina. The Communist Party never received any votes in South Carolina, even though back then South Carolina had private ballots, not government-printed ballots. The Communist Party never had the organizational strength in South Carolina to print up private ballots and distribute them to any voters, so no Communist presidential candidate ever received even one vote in the state. The Communist Party ran in the presidential elections of 1924, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984.

The Socialist Workers Party was never on the ballot in South Carolina either.

On March 20, the Idaho legislature passed SB 1244. It expands the zone around polling places in which petitioning and other types of speech about the election is prohibited.

Meanwhile, the case against Wyoming’s 250 feet zone is pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has not yet set a date to consider whether to hear the case. Lee v Frank, 23-901.