The New York Times of April 29 has this feature story on Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers, who is being forced into retirement after 40 years due to term limits. The New York Times told a lot of interesting anecdotes about Chambers, but did not mention that in 1988, he registered as a member of the New Alliance Party and won its primary, to be the party nominee for U.S. Senate. Not surprisingly, he won the NAP nomination unanimously, and as the NAP candidate in November, polled 1.55% of the vote.

He was also running for re-election to the legislature in 1988. The Nebraska legislature is non-partisan, but the election law said he could not be on the ballot for two offices simultaneously. So, Chambers ran as a write-in candidate for re-election to the legislature, and he kept his seat, winning with 2,084 write-ins. Therefore, one could honestly say that the New Alliance Party had its own state legislator that year, since he was a registered member of that party.

The New Alliance Party existed as a nationally-organized party from 1982 until 1994. Its presidential candidate in 1988 and 1992 was Lenora Fulani. The party dissolved itself in 1994 so that its members could help create the Patriot Party. That, in turn, was dissolved in 1995 so that its members could become part of the new Reform Party. Today the old nucleus of the New Alliance Party is organized as CUIP, a non-partisan group that promotes the interests of independent voters.

On April 22, Emerson French, a high school student in Tempe, Arizona, filed the paper work to launch two statewide initiatives. One would implement Condorcet Voting in federal and state elections in Arizona, and the other would make it easier to qualify a new party for the ballot. Condorcet Voting, which virtually requires computers, provides that voters rank each candidate. The vote-counting system runs a two-way race between each possible pair of candidates; the winner is the candidate who wins all those hypothetical two-way matches.

Each initiative needs 153,365 valid signatures, due by July 3, so these initiatives are unlikely to qualify for the ballot. French says he hopes that supporters of these ideas will notice that the initiative has been pre-filed and will support them. Since French is 17 years old, he is not permitted to circulate his own initiatives, until he turns 18 in May 2008.

Wayne A. Root, one of the candidates for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, is setting out to telephone every Libertarian Party delegate to the May national convention. Since not all states have even finalized their list of delegates, he is working with an even more expansive list, a list of potential delegates plus actual delegates, which has over 1,000 names on it. Others may be able to contradict me, but I doubt that anyone seeking any minor party’s presidential nomination has ever actually done that very time-consuming and worthwhile task. Perhaps major party presidential candidates, back in past times when a large share of major party national convention delegates were unpledged, made a similar effort.