The shrinking hopes for a Michigan presidential primary shrank even more on November 19. Michigan State House leaders decided not to meet on November 20. This dooms the bill that would have tinkered with the presidential primary to make it feasible.

The only slight chance for a presidential primary would be for the State Supreme Court to accept the state’s appeal in the Grebner lawsuit, and reverse the lower courts, on the issue of whether it is constitutional for the government to furnish the list of primary participants to the two major parties, and no one else.

But since the State Supreme Court didn’t accept the case on November 19, and since the decision would need to come by noon, November 21, that scenario seems unlikely.

If there is no Michigan presidential primary, the Republicans will choose their national delegates at a state convention on January 25-26. Democrats would hold caucuses, but no one knows when they would be held.

The Arkansas Green Party next year will hold a presidential primary on February 5. This will be the first time any party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, has ever had a presidential primary in Arkansas. There were no presidential primaries in Arkansas until 1976.

The Green Party submitted a petition earlier this year to regain its qualified status, and is the only third party ballot-qualified (except that the Libertarian Party is ballot-qualified just to be on for president in November 2008). Running in the Green presidential primary are Jared Ball, Howie Hawkins, Cynthia McKinney, Kent Mesplay, and Kat Swift. UPDATE: Hawkins is not running in this primary. Arkansas Green Party rules require presidential primary candidates to sign a pledge that if nominated, the candidate will accept. Hawkins is not interested in running for president himself; he has been offering his name in various Green presidential primaries as a stand-in for Ralph Nader.

At the November 7, 2007 election in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, six write-in candidates for local office won, even though they had ballot-listed opponents. See this story in the Scranton Times-Tribune. The article says that write-ins will be increasingly used in the county, now that the county no longer uses old-fashioned mechanical lever voting machines. One of the disadvantages of those machines was always the extreme difficulty of casting write-in votes. Another problem was the difficulty in counting them. Those machines are now illegal, under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, although New York state continues to use them in violation of the federal law.