On July 14, the Ohio Constitution Party submitted almost 12,000 signatures to place Chuck Baldwin on the November ballot as an independent presidential candidate. He is the first independent presidential petition to submit a petition in Ohio this year. The state requires 5,000 signatures, but Ohio voter registration records are so poorly maintained, no one is safe unless they turn in double the requirement.
The Boston Globe has this column by Jeff Jacoby in its July 16 issue. Jacoby attacks the National Popular Vote Plan in a piece that is not analytical. He talks grandly about the need for avoid “tyranny of the majority”. The tyranny of the majority is checked by the U.S. Constitution, which protects minorities from having their rights abridged by a popular majority. The problem of the tyranny of the majority has nothing to do with the electoral college. The problem with the electoral college is that sometimes it gives us a “tyranny of the minority.” As bad as tyranny of the majority is, tyranny of the minority is even worse.
The sole issue in the Electoral College debate is whether the U.S. should use a system in which the person who comes in second can take office, instead of the person who comes in first. No one can really defend that idea that the person who comes in second should take office, so proponents of the existing system always try to change the subject and rely on emotion instead of analysis.
Jacoby tries to pooh-pooh the problem with the 2000 election. He says the difference between Gore’s popular vote and Bush’s popular vote was “miniscule.” The margin was 537,179 votes, a number that is not “miniscule.” In 2000, there were 10 states which cast fewer votes for president than 537,179: Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, as well as D.C.
Jeff Wood, a member of the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature, announced on July 8 that he will run for re-election as an independent, not as a Republican. See this story. Thanks to IndependentPoliticalReport for the news.
On July 15, the Minnesota deadline for filing for the primary, Dean Barkley filed in the Independence Party primary for U.S. Senate. Another Independence Party member, Jack Ulrich, also filed for the seat, so the party will have a contested primary. Barkley was the U.S. Senator for Minnesota for a few months in late 2002, after Senator Paul Wellstone was killed.
On July 15, Bob Barr held a press conference in Oklahoma City to denounce the state’s ballot access laws, and to say that he is about to file a lawsuit against the independent presidential procedure. He also turned in 9,488 signatures on an independent petition.
No one has appeared on the ballot as an independent presidential candidate in Oklahoma since 1992. According to the U.S. Supreme Court in Storer v Brown, an independent candidate petition procedure that is rarely used is probably unconstitutional. Also, Oklahoma seems to have little interest in making independent presidential ballot access difficult, since Oklahoma requires no signatures at all for independent candidates for other office. Yet in Anderson v Celebrezze, the U.S. Supreme Court said that states have less interest in keeping presidential candidates off their ballots, than candidates for other office. This is because a presidential election is of concern to the entire nation. Here is a link to the Tulsa World’s coverage of the Barr press conference.
