On May 13, Mississippi held a special run-off US House election in the First District. Democrat Travis Childers appears to have won with approximately 54% of the vote. When this district voted in November 2006, the vote had been Republican 65.9%, Democratic 34.1%.
The West Virginia Secretary of State’s webpage is posting election returns for all candidates on the ballot, and all races. Thus, the Secretary of States’s webpage is superior in some ways to CNN. On the other hand, the Secretary of State’s webpage only posts results from counties that are complete, so it doesn’t have as many votes tallied. But for those who want to know how John Edwards is doing in the Democratic primary, and how Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Keyes, and Jerry Curry, are doing in the Republican presidential primary, check the Secretary of State’s page.
Here is a link to the CNN election returns page for West Virginia.
The North Carolina legislature re-convened on May 13, and will sit for at least six weeks, possibly eight weeks. If the state court in Raleigh should declare the ballot access laws for new parties unconstitutional, in the next week or so, the legislature will perhaps quickly revise the law. It is somewhat fortunate that the legislature is in session. That will make it somewhat more realistic for the attorneys for the Libertarian and Green Parties to persuade the court to declare the existing law void. The court will thus not need to wrestle with the question of what state policy should be, if the existing law is indeed declared unconstitutional.
Cindy Sheehan, independent candidate for U.S. House from California’s 8th district (most of San Francisco), has 900 signatures on her petition to get on the ballot. She needs 10,198 valid signatures by August 8 (3% of the number of registered voters). She has a campaign headquarters at 1260 Mission Street. See her web page. No one has qualified as an independent for U.S. House from California since 1996. California’s requirement for independent candidates for U.S. House is the 4th most difficult in the nation (only Georgia, Illinois, and North Carolina have more severe requirements).
