On September 1, the Republican National Convention approved the party’s rules for future presidential primary dates. The 2012 rules are barely changed from the 2008 rules. New Hampshire and South Carolina may hold late January presidential primaries. Iowa and Nevada may hold caucuses in early January. Other primaries (if they are binding, and not beauty contests) may state in March. See this story.
The Alaskan Independence Party is continuing to stick with Chuck Baldwin as its presidential candidate. The party has turned in its paperwork to have the Constitution Party national nominees on the AIP’s line.
According to an interview with Bob Bird, the Alaskan Independence Party’s U.S. Senate candidate, posted at www.independentpoliticalreport.com, the Alaskan Independence Party is not currently pleased with Sarah Palin. Palin supports a natural gas pipeline from the North Shore of Alaska through Canada and down to the lower 48 states. The Alaskan Independence Party prefers a natural gas pipeline south to Valdez, where the natural gas could be liquefied and sent in ships to various ports on both sides of the Pacific, North American and Asian.
UPDATE: ABC News carried this story on September 1 about Palin’s membership in the Alaskan Independence Party before 1996. Thanks to Eric Dondero’s LibertarianRepublican blog for that link; see it here. The ABC Story quotes Lynette Clark as saying Clark likes Palin, but can’t understand why she would support John McCain; Clark also confirms Palin’s pre-1996 membership. Finally, Clark notes that Palin’s husband was also a member of the Alaskan Independence Party before 1996; in 1996 he switched to being registered in no political party.
In October 2006, when Sarah Palin was the Republican nominee for Governor, she participated in a 5-person debate with her Democratic, Green, Libertarian, and independent opponents. There were actually six candidates for Governor on the November 2006 ballot. The 6th candidate, Alaskan Independence Party nominee Don Wright, was also invited into the debate. However, he did not make an appearance. The November 1 2006 paper issue of Ballot Access News has a comprehensive listing of all the instances at which minor party and independent candidates for Governor and U.S. Senate were able to debate their major party opponents during the 2006 campaign season.
Perhaps there will be an opportunity for “Rock the Debates” activists to ask Sarah Palin if she will debate any of her minor party opponents for vice-president, when she debates Joe Biden. Although presumably John McCain already signed an agreement with the Commission on Presidential Debates that he will not participate in any debates except the exclusionary Commission Debates, it is unlikely that Palin has signed any such agreement.
Palin also appears pro-minor party in her speech welcoming the Alaskan Independence Party state convention to Fairbanks in 2008. She says, “Competition is so good; and that applies to political parties as well.”
In this clip, Alaskan Independence Party leader Dexter Clark is heard making a speech to athe 2008 AIP state convention). The clip is 9 minutes long. At six minutes and 15 seconds into the clip, Clark says that Palin was once a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, in the period before she ran for Wasilla City Council.
The Boston Tea Party has a presidential and vice-presidential candidate who are on the ballot in three states, Colorado, Florida and Tennessee. The Boston Tea Party will also try to qualify for write-in status in Texas, for its national ticket. Texas law says write-in candidates for president were supposed to have filed their declaration of candidacy by August 26. But Texas law also says that ballot-qualified parties are supposed to certify the names of their presidential and vice-presidential tickets by August 26. The Democratic and Republican Parties missed this deadline, but on August 29, the Texas Secretary of State added their nominees to its web page anyway. Authority for the Texas leniency comes from two 1996 Texas Supreme Court decisions, Davis v Taylor and Bird v Rothstein. Those decisions say that when a party official makes a paperwork mistake, the candidates should not be punished for that mistake and must still be considered qualified.
Therefore, under the logic of the 1996 precedents, and by the logic of this year’s leniency for the major parties, the Texas Secretary of State, to be consistent, ought to accept late paperwork for declared write-in candidates. This is especially true, since there is no rational reason why the write-in deadline needs to be early anyway. The list of declared write-in presidential candidates does not impact on ballot printing.
In the meantime, the Constitution Party of Texas did file its write-in paperwork on August 20, but the Secretary of State lost it. The party has proof that the paperwork was received in the Secretary of State’s office. So far, the Texas Secretary of State has equivocated on whether she will accept the Constitution Party’s write-in presidential status.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court said that it violates the First Amendment for a state to require that parties let non-members help choose their nominees (California Democratic Party v Jones). However, some states require an unqualified party to circulate petitions that carry the names of that party’s nominees. The language on these petitions typically says that the signers “hereby nominate” the candidates who are listed on the petition.
In 2006, the Constitution, Green and Libertarian Parties jointly filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, which has no procedure for an unqualified party to place its nominees on the November ballot, except by a petition that lists the party’s candidates. The three parties argued that this system violates the core principle of California Democratic Party v Jones. However, the lawsuit lost. The 3rd circuit said that the miscellaneous voters on the street who sign the petition are not really nominating that party’s nominees.
The 3rd circuit said, at page 198 (the decision is at 468 F 3d 189), “Jones is not applicable to a ballot access case like the present one, in which internal party deliberations on the choice of party candidates are not implicated. Unlike the law at issue in Jones, Pennsylvania election law does not open the intra-party deliberations of minor political parties to persons who are unaffiliated with the party. Forced association caused by sec. 2911b occurs only as a minor party candidate solicits signatures from registered voters, who may be registered with any party or as an independent…In Pennsylvania, a minor political party is free to select anyone it chooses as its candidate.”
So, even though the Pennsylvania petitions have signature lines under a heading that says, “I hereby nominate…”, the court, in order to save the Pennsylvania law from a judgment of unconstitutionality, interpreted the procedure to mean that the petition signers are not nominating anyone. Instead, the 3rd circuit said, petition signers are saying only they want that party to be on the ballot. This interpretation will help the Libertarian Party with its pending lawsuits over whether it can have nominees on the November ballot who are different individuals than the individuals who had been listed on petitions.
