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.

On November 19, the Connecticut Secretary of State released the names of major party presidential primary candidates. Republicans are Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Alan Keyes, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo and Fred Thompson (9 names). Democrats are Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson (8 names).

Connecticut law provides that the Secretary of State should choose the list, based on media reports. Candidates need not file.