On July 17, Bob Barr and his candidates for presidential elector in Oklahoma filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma procedures for qualifying an independent presidential candidate. The procedures are so difficult that they have not been used since 1992. UPDATE: the case number is civ-08-730-R.
On July 17, a U.S. District Court granted an injunction, putting the Ohio Libertarian Party on the November ballot, for president, Congress, and state legislative races. Libertarian Party of Ohio v Brunner, s.d., 2:08-cv-555.
The basis for the injunction was (1) the U.S. Constitution requires that election laws for federal office be written by state legislatures, and therefore the Secretary of State cannot make up ballot access rules; (2) even if the Secretary of State did have authority to write ballot access rules, it is still unconstitutional to force a party to submit a hefty petition almost a full year before the general election. See the decision at this link, courtesy of ElectionLawBlog.
It is not known if the Secretary of State will appeal to the 6th circuit.
A Zogby/Reuters Poll released July 16 shows these results when voters are presented with a list of 4 presidential candidates: Obama 46%, McCain 36%, Barr 3%, Nader 3%, other or undecided 12%. See here for more details. When the voter is only presented with the names of Obama and McCain, 3% still volunteer someone else. Thanks to ThirdPartyWatch for this news.
If Bob Barr polled 3% in each state, the Libertarian Party would become a qualified party, for the first time ever, in Arkansas, Connecticut (presidential status only), Iowa, and Kentucky. At that point, the only states in which the party would never have been a qualified party would be Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia. Minnesota requires a vote of 5% for any statewide race; New Jersey requires 10% for all votes cast for lower house of the legislature; New York requires 50,000 votes for Governor; Pennsylvania requires registration of 15%; Rhode Island requires 5% for president or governor; Virginia requires 10% for any statewide race. The Tennessee requirement is currently under attack in federal court.
The Libertarian Party has also never been a qualified party in the District of Columbia, but it has some reason to believe it can attain that status this year, since it has a strong candidate for Delegate to the U.S House. He needs 7,500 votes to give the party “qualified” status.
Finally, although the Libertarian Party has been a qualified party for statewide office in both Illinois and Georgia, it has never been a ballot-qualified party in those two states for district and county office. Those two states, along with Connecticut, are the only states in which it is possible for a party to be “qualified” for all statewide office, but not all office.
YouTube has thousands of videos of candidates running for office. The YouTube “Politicians Channel” is at this link. On July 14, Google announced that it is launching the “Google Elections Video Search gadget”, which will use speech recognition technology to prepare the text of each of these videos. Then, the gadget will search the text of the speeches for content on a particular topic. Thanks to Ed Still for this news. The gadget doesn’t seem to be in operation yet, but is described at this link.
Ken Lindell was a Republican member of the Maine State House during the 2005-2007 term. While he was in office, he tried to pass a bill that would have substantially eased the definition of “political party”. His bill would have let a party be recognized if it had a state organization. His bill did not pass. A somewhat similar bill in that session, sponsored by Green Party legislator John Eder, also failed to pass. Also, a somewhat similar bill also failed to pass in the 2007-2008 session.
Lindell was defeated for re-election in November 2006. However, he won a 3-person Republican primary last month for the same seat, the 41st State House district. The incumbent Democrat is not running for re-election. Lindell was once a member of the Libertarian Party, and it seems likely that if he is elected this year, he will work for a better definition of “political party” in 2009. Maine requires a party to poll 5% for either Governor, or President, at either of the last two elections, to remain on the ballot. The median vote test in the 50 states is 2%.
