The Chicago Tribune has this article in its November 17 edition, about the Illinois system for determining if candidate petitions are valid or not. New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, are the only three states in the country in which tradition and habits say it is legitimate and normal for candidates to challenge the primary ballot access petitions of their rivals, so as to eliminate those rivals from primary ballots. Most states don’t even use petitions for candidate ballot access to partisan primaries. And in many of the states that do use petitions to control access to the primary ballot, elections officials check those petitions in a fair, apolitical, competent manner, and challenges aren’t part of the system.

And even in the handful of other states that do use petitions for primary ballot access, and technically depend on the challenge system, the norm is that such petitions never get challenged. One example of such a state is Wisconsin.

Newspapers in New York frequently criticize the challenge system in that state, but it is somewhat rare for Illinois newspapers to make such criticisms, so this article is welcome. The article points out that petition challenges in Illinois primaries are becoming more and more common, perhaps because access to the voter registration rolls is easier than it has been, partly because of the internet.

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).