On Saturday, September 20, Frank MacKay said that the New York Independence Party will nominate John McCain for president and Sarah Palin for vice-president. This will be the first time the Independence Party has ever cross-endorsed a major party ticket for president and vice-president. In 1996 it chose Ross Perot; in 2000 it chose John Hagelin; in 2004 it chose Ralph Nader.
The state convention is in Albany on September 21.
Anthony Pollina won enough write-ins in the September 9 Vermont primary to become the Progressive Party’s gubernatorial nominee. The law requires write-in winners to receive at least 250 write-ins, and he won more than that. However, he still declined the nomination. He will be on the ballot only as an independent, even though he is a recent former state chair of the Progressive Party.
Although a poll earlier this month showed him at only 7%, since then he has won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, the teachers union, and the state employees union.
Vermont’s Democratic member of the U.S. House, Peter Welch, won the Republican nomination by write-in votes. He received 600 write-ins in the Republican primary. No Republican appeared on the Republican primary ballot for that office. Welch will accept the Republican nomination, so he will be listed in November as “Democratic, Republican.”
Richard Carroll, Green Party nominee for the Arkansas state house in North Little Rock, has been endorsed by these unions: Sheet Metal Workers, Building Trades, UTU, Electrical Workers, and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. Two more endorsements are expected soon. Carroll is the only person on the November ballot. But he has two Democratic Party write-in opponents.
On September 19, a U.S. District Court in Montana held a trial in Kelly v Johnson, the challenge to the March petition deadline for non-presidential independent candidate petitions. Another round of briefs will be filed by September 22.
Republican Party officials in Pennsylvania have notified national Libertarian Party officials that they plan to appeal the Barr substitution decision to the state supreme court.
On September 15, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth ruled against the challenge to Bob Barr’s substitution paperwork. The court decision said “In nominating Etzel prior to the Libertarian National Convention and substituting Barr thereafter, the Party and LPPa merely complied with the Party’s election process as it has been established in Pennsylvania since 1996 when, nationally, the Party moved its convention from a date prior to the legal date for circulation of Pennsylvania nomination papers to a subsequent date. Since then, given the time constraints, the Party and LPPa have deemed it necessary to circulate nomination papers prior to their national convention in order to take full and fair advantage of the time period allotted under Pennsylvania’s Election Code to secure the necessary signatures in support of their candidate…the Party simply took reasonable action to abide by the Election Code while furthering its legitimate interest.â€
