On October 10, the St. Joseph County, Indiana, Green Party persuaded the county Elections Board to revise the system for counting write-in votes. The new system will enable Greens to know how many write-in votes they receive on election night. However, the new system also slightly compromises the secret ballot. The new system provides that voters who cast a write-in vote put their ballot in the “auxiliary bin” of the machine that tallies the optical scan ballots, instead of feeding the ballot into the main slot on the machine. That way, the ballots in the auxiliary bin can be quickly separated out (after the polls close) and the write-ins tallied on election night. St. Joseph County includes South Bend, and Greens have been running a vigorous campaign for their write-in candidates for South Bend city office.

Early this year, the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office said in writing that the Green Party is still a ballot-qualified party. However, since then, the Director of the Bureau of Elections has resigned, and the new Director does not believe that the Green Party is ballot-qualified. The new Director did say orally that if the Green Party showed him the letter from the past Director, saying the party is qualified, he would honor it. However, now he is equivocating. The Green Party will be consulting an attorney.

The New Jersey Libertarian Party filed a lawsuit in state court on October 10, complaining about the fact that even though one of its candidates for Assembly, Jason Scheurer, qualified for public funding, the November 2007 ballot will say that his Republican and Democratic opponents are “clean”, whereas the ballot will not say that the Scheurer is “clean”.