On July 14, Ralph Nader turned in 18,000 signatures to qualify as an independent presidential candidate in South Carolina. The state requires 10,000. Nader is the first person to submit petitions as an independent candidate in South Carolina since 1992, when Perot also qualified as an independent in that state.

In 2004, Nader had received the nomination of the ballot-qualified Independence Party of South Carolina. This year, the Independence Party of South Carolina has equivocated about whom it wants to nominate for president. The party’s leadership has considered nominating Barack Obama, although it is unlikely that Obama will let any ballot-qualified party in South Carolina (other than the Democratic Party, of course) nominate him. The South Carolina Attorney General still hasn’t issued his opinion on whether two parties that jointly run the same slate of presidential electors, can have their vote totals added together.

On July 14, the California Secretary of State released the official totals from the June 3 primary, including all write-in totals. In the 15th State Senate district, no Democrat was on the ballot. Dennis Morris, a Democratic attorney in Pismo Beach, had filed as a write-in for the Democratic primary when he learned that no other Democrat was running. He polled 2,096 write-ins. The Republican incumbent, Senator Abel Maldonado, had also filed to have his write-ins counted in the Democratic primary, but Maldonado only received 533 write-ins.

Under California Election Code section 8605, no one may receive the nomination of a party by write-in votes, unless he or she receives a number of write-ins equal to 1% of the vote for that office in the last general election. So, even though Morris’ write-in total is very impressive, he cannot be considered nominated; he needed 3,689 write-ins to meet that standard. Since the California Constitution, since 2004, has said, “A political party shall not be denied the ability to place on the general election ballot the candidate who received, at the primary election, the highest vote among that party’s candidates”, Morris intends to bring a lawsuit, alleging that sec. 8605 violates the California Constitution.

IndependentPoliticalReport has posted Cynthia McKinney’s acceptance speech, delivered in Chicago on July 12. See this link. C-SPAN broadcast it twice on Sunday, July 13.