Long-time Chicago columnist and blogger Dennis Byrne has this op-ed in the Chicago Tribune of August 11. His point is that no one is in charge of determining whether candidates for federal office meet the constitutional qualifications.

Of course, the Constitution does give Congress the authority to count the electoral votes, and precedent permits Congress to refuse to count electoral votes for candidates for president or vice-president who do not meet the constitutional qualifications. This precedent was set in 1869, when Congress refused to count the three electoral votes for Horace Greeley. Congress felt the votes were void because Greeley had died after the November 1868 election, but before the electoral college had met in December.

Byrne’s column would have been stronger if he had mentioned the patchwork state of the law, when a presidential candidate who is clearly not eligible files to be on the ballot. The Socialist Workers Party has several times nominated under age 35 candidates for President. About half the states in which the party has petitioned print the name of such a candidate on the ballot anyway, under the theory that the true candidates are the presidential elector candidates. The other states have a different policy.

The Wisconsin Constitution Party has a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010, Rob Taylor. His campaign website is here. If he polls 1% of the vote in 2010, the party’s status as a qualified party will be regained.

The Constitution Party first attained status as a qualified party in Wisconsin in 1994, when it polled 1.36% for Secretary of State. It kept that status (by polling 1% every four years for one of the statewide offices) until 2006. By then, the party’s leader, Ed Frami, had died, and its two 2006 statewide nominees failed to get themselves on the party’s primary ballot, so obviously they couldn’t get 1% of the vote in November 2006.

Congressional Quarterly’s Politics blog has this analysis of the 2010 Rhode Island gubernatorial race. The piece concludes by saying that the outcome is best described just now as a “tossup” between independent candidate Lincoln Chafee and the eventual Democratic Party nominee. See the piece here.