The Constitution Party has run a presidential candidate in each of the last five presidential elections. In 2008, its presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, polled a higher percentage of the vote than any previous Constitution Party presidential candidate had ever polled in 27 states.

Those 27 states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Ironically, however, 2008 wasn’t the Constitution Party’s best presidential showing. Baldwin in 2008 polled .15% of the total vote, whereas in 1996 Howard Phillips had polled .19%. Phillips was on the ballot in 1996 in four populous states in which Baldwin wasn’t on (California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania).

The Libertarian Party also hit new presidential percentage records in 2008, in two states, Indiana and North Carolina.

The only other minor parties that had a presidential candidate in 2008 as well as in previous years which hit new percentage records are the Working Families Party in New York, the Peace & Freedom Party of California, and the Natural Law Party of Michigan. The latter two parties nominated Ralph Nader in 2008.

On December 23, the Alabama ballot access case called Shugart v Chapman was removed from the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, to the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, at the state’s request. The suit challenges the number of signatures needed for an independent candidate for U.S. House. The lawsuit points out that in the district at issue, the law requires over 6,100 valid signatures, whereas the state only requires 5,000 signatures for an independent presidential candidate. The case is now assigned to U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Capel.

In 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot require more signatures for an office in just part of the state, than for a statewide office. The Alabama case had been filed in Birmingham because the district is near Birmingham, but the state argued that the case should have been filed in Montgomery because the Secretary of State’s office is there.

Professor James T. Bennett has just published “Stifling Political Competition: How Government Has Rigged the System to Benefit Demopublicans and Exclude Third Parties.” The publisher is the prestigious Springer Company, which is the world’s largest publisher of books on science, technology and medicine. Springer has published over 150 Nobel prize-winners. Professor Bennett is an Eminent Scholar at George Mason University and holds the William P. Snavely Chair of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Economics Department. He is the founder and director of the Journal of Labor Research.