South Carolina held its primary (for all office other than president) on June 10. The Democratic U.S. Senate primary was won by Bob Conley. Now it has been revealed that Conley was on the Horry County Republican Committee, and that he voted in the Republican presidential primary earlier in the year. News reports say he voted for Ron Paul. See this story. South Carolina doesn’t have registration by party, so it isn’t always easy to pin down anyone’s party membership. Thanks to Jack Ross for this story.

South Carolina permits two or more parties to jointly nominate the same candidate for any particular office, including president. Many times in the past, presidential candidates (and their slates of presidential electors) have been the nominees of two South Carolina parties. However, in none of the past instances has the presidential election in South Carolina been so close that the use of fusion affected the outcome.

This year, the South Carolina Working Families Party, and the United Citizens Party, both want to cross-endorse the Democratic Party’s slate of electors, so that Barack Obama would be listed as the nominee of all three parties (with voter choice as to which party label to vote for). But the South Carolina Elections Commission refuses to say whether, if this happened, the votes on all three tickets would be added together.

On June 19, the South Carolina Elections Commission said it will not decide this matter. Instead, it said the Secretary of State will need to decide. The excuse for putting the responsibility on the Secretary of State is that the Secretary of State handles paperwork involving presidential electors. The South Carolina Elections Commission is non-partisan, but the Secretary of State, Mark Hammond, is an elected Republican. It seems only common sense that if a candidate for any office is listed on the ballot twice, under two party labels, that the vote for him or her under each label should be added together.

Instances in the past when two different parties in South Carolina jointly nominated the same candidates for presidential elector include 1940, 1972, and perhaps 1928, 1932, 1936, and 1996.

California has the nation’s second-most restrictive election law, concerning how a write-in candidate may receive the nomination of a political party at the primary. Only Tennessee’s law is more restrictive. The law requires the write-in candidate at the primary to not only receive the most votes, but to poll a number of write-ins equal to 1% of the vote cast for that office at the last general election. Most states have a threshold that is related to the size of the particular political party, but California’s law does not take the size of the party into consideration. As a result, it is virtually impossible for any minor party to nominate anyone by write-ins at its own primary. No minor party has succeeded since 1968.

The Peace & Freedom Party wants to attack this law in court, and felt that an ideal test case would come about, if there were a Peace & Freedom Party result in which a write-in candidate outpolled a candidate for the same office who was listed on the ballot. Then, the paradox would exist that the ballot-listed person could not be nominated (since he or she had been defeated by the write-in candidate), but the winner couldn’t be nominated either (because of the minimum vote law). The test case was centered on the Assembly, 9th district, in Sacramento. The write-in candidate was C. T. Weber, a former state chair of the party and someone who has been active in the party for decades. Unfortunately, the ballot-listed candidate, Gerald Frink, polled more votes in the June 3, 2008 primary, even though both Frink and Weber and other activists made a concerted effort to reach Peace & Freedom primary voters and ask them to write-in Weber. The final results are 76 for Gerald Frink, and 41 for C. T. Weber.

In other Peace & Freedom Party news, the party has still not found a building in which to hold its state convention. The convention will be in Sacramento, August 2-3, and will choose presidential electors. The choice of presidential electors will determine who will be listed as the party’s presidential nominee.