On August 6, the Federal Election Commission released its book Federal Elections 2008. It contains the number of votes cast by state for each presidential candidate. It also contains the number of votes received by each candidate for Congress in 2008. The link to the on-line version is here. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
New York city councilmember Alan Gerson is running for re-election in the September 2009 Democratic primary. He is currently off the ballot. He needed 900 valid signatures and he submitted 7,000. But some of the petitions, containing about 1,000 signatures, were bound into a book that showed the candidate’s address as 1505 LaGuardia Place instead of 505 LaGuardia Place. The Board of Elections asked him to correct the error, but when the error was fixed, no new cover sheet with the correct address was submitted, so now all the signatures are no good. Gerson will be in court next week. See this news story. Thanks to Kimberly Wilder for the news.
Detroit voted for Mayor on August 4, 2009, using a non-partisan election. D’Artagnan Collier campaigned as the nominee of the Socialist Equality Party, and polled 1.4% of the vote in a six-candidate field.
Although this is a modest percentage, it is the highest percentage that any candidate for Mayor of Detroit, who was sponsored by any socialist party, has received since 1951. Among the parties that have run candidates for Mayor of Detroit since World War II are the Socialist Workers Party (which last ran in 2001), the Workers League (predecessor party to the Socialist Equality Party), and the Revolutionary Workers Party. In 1951 the Socialist Workers Party candidate had received 1.6%.
On August 6, Arizona Representative Doug Quelland filed a lawsuit in state court to retain his seat in the legislature. The Clean Elections Commission had voted 4-1 to remove him from office, back on May 15, 2009. Arizona’s public funding body is so powerful, it has the power to remove state legislators who violate the campaign finance laws. The Commission had determined that Quelland spent $15,000 to hire a campaign consultant, but didn’t acknowledge this expenditure on his campaign reports. See this story. Quelland was only the second legislator removed by the Clean Elections Commission in the ten years the Commission has existed. Quelland was elected to the legislature in 2002 and 2004, defeated in 2006, and elected in 2008. He is a Republican who has always supported Arizona’s public funding law.
On August 5, the Tucson, Arizona, city council voted 5-1 to sue the state, over the new law that requires the city to use non-partisan city elections. See this article.
