Delaware will hold a special election soon to fill the vacant State Senate seat, 19th district. The seat is vacant because Senator Thurman Adams, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, died on June 23.

The Republican nominee will be Joe Booth, and the Libertarian nominee will be Wendy Jones. The Democratic Party had nominated Eddy Parker a week ago, but he withdrew on July 7, so the party will soon choose a new nominee. In Delaware special legislative elections, all parties, major and minor alike, nominate by committee meeting. See this story for more details.

On July 4, Chelene Nightingale announced her candidacy for Governor of California in the American Independent Party primary. She is an activist on the issue of stopping aliens from entering the United States illegally. Here is her webpage. If she becomes the California AIP’s nominee, she will be its first female gubernatorial candidate since 1978, when Theresa Dietrich was the AIP gubernatorial nominee.

On July 7, the Obion County, Tennessee, Election Commission voted to sue the state of Tennessee. The county is upset because state law requires all counties, starting in 2010, to use vote-counting machines that have a paper trail. Obion County currently uses touch screen machines that have no paper trail. See this article. The county’s claim that no optical scan ballot system is available is puzzling, since hundreds of counties around the U.S. use optical scan ballots. Optical scan ballots are paper ballots that are read by scanning machines, so obviously optical scan ballots do leave a paper trail. They can be recounted by hand if necessary.