The three Pennsylvania qualified minor parties are awaiting a decision from the 3rd circuit, on whether they should be required to submit petitions this year. In the meantime, the Green Party has spent $100,000 in Pennsylvania this year, to obtain the needed 67,070 valid signatures. The deadline is August 1, and the Green Party’s statewide slate expects to turn in at least 90,000 signatures.
The Constitution Party is a ballot-qualified party in Wisconsin, so it nominates by primary. Parties remain on the ballot by polling 1% for any statewide race.
The only two individuals running for statewide office in the Constitution Party both failed to get enough signatures to be on their own party’s primary ballot. Therefore, unless either of them can get 2,000 write-ins in their own party’s primary in September, neither will be on the November ballot. Chances are high that the party will then go off the ballot, since it won’t have polled 1% for any statewide office.
Harris Interactive recently released a poll asking, “If the election of Congress were being held today, would you be voting for the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate?” The responses were: Democratic 44%, Republican 31%, “other” 17%, undecided 8%. The poll was taken July 7-10, 2006.
On July 28, a lawsuit was filed to overturn California election code section 8605, which makes it extremely difficult for parties to nominate candidates by write-ins in their own primaries. Sonoma County Republican Central Committee & Raylene Wiesner v McPherson. The case number has not yet been assigned.
In November 2004, the California voters amended the state constitution, to provide that parties cannot be denied the right to place on the November ballot, the person who got the most votes in that party’s primary. Raylene Wiesner was the only candidate in the Republican primary this year for Assembly, 7th district. She was a write-in in that primary. She received 687 write-in votes, but sec. 8605 says that she needed 1,683 write-in votes. No one in any California partisan primary this year received enough votes to be nominated under section 8605, but section 8605 appears invalid, given the new Constitutional provision. The case was filed in Superior Court in Sacramento.
Ohio law permits candidates who get on the November ballot by petition to choose one of two labels, “other-party candidate” or “no-party candidate”. This law, passed in 2002, was opposed by the Secretary of State. Since then, the Secretary of State has used every trick at his command to thwart the law.
This year, there are two minor party candidates on the ballot for Ohio governor, Bob Fitrakis of the Green Party, and Bill Peirce of the Libertarian Party. Both of them have been denied the ability to have “other-party candidate” on the November ballot. This is because, when each turned in his petition, neither volunteered that they desired “other-party candidate” at that moment. No one asked them. Later, when they requested it, the Secretary of State said that since they didn’t ask for it at the moment they turned in their signatures, they will have no label at all.
In November 2004, the two petitioning presidential candidates, Michael Badnarik and Michael Peroutka, did know that they needed to volunteer their choice of a label, and each did have “other-party candidate” printed on the November ballot. However, when the Secretary of State printed his book of official election returns, called “Ohio Election Statistics 2004”, he omitted the label for each of them.
