On August 5, 2008, Howard Lydick died. He had been nominated for vice-president at the 2007 Prohibition Party national convention held by the Earl Dodge faction of that party. Lydick lived in Richardson, Texas, and had also been the 2004 vice-presidential nominee of the Earl Dodge faction of the Prohibition Party.

Earl Dodge, the presidential candidate of his faction of the Prohibition Party for 2008, had also died, in November 2007. After Dodge died, Lydick had quietly worked to heal the breach between the two factions of the Prohibition Party. His death in August 2008 was not a complete surprise, since he had been seriously ill for several weeks before his death.

On August 27, a federal court in Charleston, West Virginia, heard five and one-half hours of testimony about the constitutionality of the state’s August 1 petition deadline for minor party and independent presidential candidates. The case is Barr v Ireland. The hearing went from 1:30 pm to 7 pm. On August 28, there will be an additional telephone conference call hearing in the case. The judge indicated he will decide by August 29.

On August 27, the Ohio Green Party filed its lawsuit get on the ballot. McKinney v Brunner, U.S. District Court, 2:08-cv-819. As regular readers of this blog know, the federal courts in Ohio earlier put the Libertarian Party and the Socialist Party on the Ohio ballot, since each party showed it has some support, and the state has no valid law in place regulating which parties should be on the ballot.