Canada held a Parliamentary election on October 14. The results: 143 Conservatives, 76 Liberals, 50 Bloc Quebecois, 37 New Democratic, and 2 independents. The Green Party once more failed to win any seats. There are 308 seats.
Although no party has a majority, the dominance of the Conservative Party guarantees that the country will still be lead by that party.
On October 8, the daily newspaper for Los Alamos, New Mexico, endorsed independent Carol Miller for U.S. House, 3rd district. The third district is the northern part of New Mexico and includes Santa Fe. No incumbent is running. The other ballot-listed candidates are Democrat Ben Ray Lujan and Republican Dan East. The editorial says, “Miller is the only candidate with the necessary experience to perform for her district…Given the fact that we will have all new people in Washington – and that the issues we will be facing are huge – this is not a time for on-the-job training.”
Harvard History Professor Jill Lepore has an essay on the history of the government-printed ballot in the United States, in The New Yorker Magazine of October 13. It is a substantial article, covering six pages, yet it does not mention the point that abuse of the government-printed ballot in the United States has deprived voters of their right to vote freely for the candidate of their choice, in many instances.
Government-printed ballots in the U.S. began in 1888. Before 1888, it was impossible for any state government to prevent a voter from voting for anyone he wished. Since then, government-printed ballots have sometimes been used to prevent people from voting for presidential candidates who were so important, they carried other states in the electoral college. This list of presidential candidates who carried some states in the electoral college, and yet were off the ballot in certain other states in which they had tried to get on, includes:
1. Theodore Roosevelt (Oklahoma 1912)
2. William Howard Taft (California, South Dakota 1912)
3. Robert La Follette (Louisiana 1924)
4. Strom Thurmond (Oklahoma, Maryland, Indiana 1948)
5. Harry Truman (Alabama 1948)
6. Lyndon Johnson (Alabama 1964)
7. George Wallace (D.C. 1968)
Also, Charles Evans Hughes would have been off the ballot in Louisiana in 1916 if he had not been put on the ballot by court order.
The Lepore essay also has a factual error on another subject. It says, “In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is 18 or older – except, in some states, prisoners and felons – will be eligible to vote.” This sentence is not true. U.S. citizens who reside in U.S. territorial possessions may not vote in this fall’s Presidential election. Furthermore, persons who have been adjudged mentally incompetent may not vote at all in most states.
C-SPAN will broadcast the October 19 debate between Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, and Chuck Baldwin, although it is not yet known if it will be broadcast live. The debate will be Sunday evening, October 19, at Columbia University in New York city. The moderator will be Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio. It is possible that Pacifica Radio will also broadcast it. The debate is sponsored by Free and Equal Elections, whose webpage is www.freeandequal.org.
Bob Barr declined to participate because he is scheduled to speak somewhere else that evening. According to this MSNBC story of October 14, he will be campaigning at colleges in Ohio and Virginia during the period October 14-23.
On October 14, a U.S. District Court in Nashville ruled in favor of the Tennessee Democratic Party, and against State Senator Rosalind Kurita, in Kurita’s ballot access lawsuit. She says she will appeal to the 6th circuit. She had won the August Democratic primary but the Tennessee Democratic Party certified someone else to be the Democratic nominee. The case is Kurita v The State Primary Board of the Tennessee Democratic Party, 3:08cv-948. The decision is 41 pages. It depends on the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that give substantial autonomy on political parties to run their own affairs (see pages 10-17). It also depends on the Tennessee statutory scheme, which does seem to give political parties a great deal of authority to settle primary election vote-counting disputes (although in this case, everyone agrees that Kurita won the primary, by the narrow margin of 19 votes).
