Oklahoma Representative Mike Ritze (R-Broken Arrow) has pre-filed a bill, requiring candidates for public office to submit a copy of their Birth Certificates. Ritze is a professor of Forensic Science and a physician, and was just elected to his first term in the legislature in November 2008. Ritze introduced his bill because he does not believe that President-Elect Barack Obama has demonstrated that he meets the constitutional qualifications.

Ritze also says that he is trying to persuade U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe to object to counting electoral college votes for Obama, when Congress counts the electoral votes on January 8.

The Oklahoma legislature does not convene until February. Oklahoma legislators are free to pre-file bills, but the Oklahoma legislature’s web page does not yet have the text of pre-filed bills, so the text of Ritze’s bill is not available. Since presidential nominees of qualified parties do not actually file for the November ballot in any state, it is not clear how Ritze’s bill can accomplish its objective, relative to general election presidential nominees of qualified parties.

The Socialist Labor Party, the original party of socialism in the United States, stopped running candidates for partisan public office after 1981, but has continued to publish its newspaper, The People, on a bimonthly schedule. However, due to a shortage of funds, the paper hasn’t been published since the March-April 2008 issue.

The SLP closed its national office, which had been in San Jose, California, on September 1, and shipped a great deal of archival material to Duke University and also to the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Both institutions have good collections relating to the history of many minor parties.

The SLP hopes to resume publication of The People in 2009.

On December 31, the D.C. Court of Appeals (which is not the same as the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C.) ruled that Michael A. Brown, not Patrick Mara, is the winner of the District’s “at-large” seat that is always reserved for someone other than a Democrat. UPDATE: here is the 5-page decision.

D.C. provides that voters may vote for two candidates for City Council-at-Large, and each party may only run a single nominee. This was meant to keep the Democrats from winning all seats.

Michael A. Brown had been a prominent Democratic Party activist and had voted in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. But he had changed his registration to “independent” in May 2008, and he filed petitions to be on the November ballot as an independent. He got the most votes of all non-Democrats. Republicans had sued, claiming that Republican nominee Patrick Mara should be declared the winner since Brown was not a bona fide independent. But the Court ruled that such “real world” political associations are irrelevant.