On November 6, the voters of Aspen, Colorado, voted to use Instant-Runoff Voting for city elections. The vote was 608 “Yes” to only 186 “No”.
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In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which outlawed old-fashioned lever mechanical voting machines. New York is the only state that still uses them. On November 6, attorneys for the U.S. government filed a motion in the pending lawsuit (which had been filed by the U.S. Government in 2006), saying that the court should take jurisdiction away from the New York State Board of Elections over voting machines, if the Board doesn’t promise to obtain a new voting system in time for the November 2008 election.
No U.S. manufacturer still makes mechanical voting machines. Connecticut had been the last state (other than New York) to use them.
Longtime Prohibition Party activist and presidential candidate Earl F. Dodge died suddenly on November 7, 2007. He was age 74. He died without warning at the Denver Airport, about 8:30 a.m., just before he was about to board a flight. He devoted his entire life to the Prohibition Party. He had been national secretary of the party, for his first term in that office, in the late 1950’s.
On November 7, Saskatchewan Province in Canada held provincial elections. The Saskatchewan Party, which had been formed in 1991, won a majority in the provincial parliament. It ousted the New Democratic Party, which had been in power since 1991. The 2007 election resulted in 37 seats for the Saskatchewan Party and 21 seats for the New Democratic Party. The Liberal Party, which contested ten seats, and which is one of Canada’s two major parties, did not win any seats.
Canada has easy and equal ballot access rules for all parties, new and old alike. Even though Canada (like the United States and Great Britain) does not use proportional representation for its important elections, one sees that in a nation with decent ballot access laws, new parties do sometimes succeed in winning power.
The number of signatures needed to get on the Pennsylvania ballot in 2008 for statewide office equals 2% of the highest vote-getter’s total in the November 7, 2007 statewide judicial races.
At the November 7, 2007 election, the highest vote was received by Seamus McCaffery, one of the Democratic nominees for Supreme Court Justice. Unofficial totals give him 1,205,930 votes. 99.4% of the precincts had been counted when that figure was released. Therefore, it is likely that the 2008 requirement will be slightly less than 25,000 signatures.
In 2004, the Pennsylvania requirement was 25,697 signatures. In 2006 it was unusually high (67,070) because there had been no judicial election in 2005, and the formula defaulted back to the 2004 election, when turnout is far higher than in odd years.