On November 13, an Alaska Superior Court Judge ruled that five write-in votes should be counted, in the November 3, 2009 election for Haines Borough Assembly. As a result, write-in candidate Daymond Hoffman won the election. See this story.

The five write-in ballots that were disputed said either “Hoffman” or “D. Hoffman.” Elections officials had not counted them, on the basis that they should have said “Daymond Hoffman.” However, for over a century, there has been a general consensus in courts all across the nation that when counting write-ins, the voter’s intent controls.

California courts deviated from that general understanding in 2004 and 2005, when they ruled that write-ins should not be counted if the voter forgot to “X” the box next to the write-in line on ballots. As a result, Donna Frye, a write-in candidate for Mayor of San Diego in 2005, was deemed defeated, even though if such votes had been counted, she would have been elected.

The Hill has this short article on Joseph Kennedy, who is running as an independent candidate in the special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts in January 2010. The article says that Kennedy is registered as a Libertarian. This is factually incorrect. Kennedy would not be allowed to be an independent candidate in Massachusetts if he were a registered Libertarian, because the Libertarian Party is a ballot-qualified party. Kennedy is a dues-paying member of the Libertarian Party but he is registered “independent”, because the law requires it.

He cannot easily run as the Libertarian Party nominee for U.S. Senate because Massachusetts makes it very difficult for anyone to get on the primary ballot of a small qualified party. The state requires 10,000 signatures, and only registered party members, and registered independents, can sign to get a candidate on a partisan primary ballot. Other states that make it difficult for members of small qualified parties to get on primary ballots are Maine, and New York (for district and local office, not statewide office).

The newspapers in Vermont are now covering the fact that the Working Families Party is about to qualify itself in Vermont. See this article in the Burlington Free Press.

Party qualification is very easy in Vermont. No petition is required. A group must show the Secretary of State that it has town committees in at least ten towns. The only difficult part of the process is that it must be completed by the end of an odd year. In 2007 the Green Party failed to qualify under this process, and as a result Cynthia McKinney did not appear on the Vermont 2008 ballot. Even though the Green Party failed to qualify as a party for the 2008 ballot, it would have been free to submit a petition for McKinney by September 2008, bearing 1,000 valid signatures, but it didn’t use that process either.

The Working Families is already ballot-qualified in New York, Oregon, South Carolina, and Delaware. It is also qualified in Connecticut for all U.S. House seats and many legislative seats and local offices. In the past it was a qualified party in Massachusetts, but it lost that status in 2008 because it didn’t run any statewide nominees and it did not get its registration up to 1% of the state registration total.