A U.S. District Court in Arkansas will hear the Green Party’s ballot access lawsuit on August 17-18. Green Party of Arkansas v Daniels, 4:06cv-758. The issue is the number of signatures needed for a new party.
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On August 1, a neutral poll was published for Maine. In the gubernatorial race, the results are: Democrat 42%, Republican 24%, Green 3%, independent state legislator Barbara Merrill 3%, three other independents combined, under 1%; undecided 27%.
In the U.S. Senate race, the results are: Republican 68%, Democrat 10%, independent Bill Slavick 4%, undecided 18%. Republican incumbent Olympia Snowe is very popular and won her last race in 2000 with 69%.
There are 33 U.S. Senate seats up this year. The only states in which there will certainly be no one on the ballot for U.S. Senate, other than a Democrat and Republican, are Ohio and Rhode Island. It is not yet possible to know whether a minor party or independent candidate for U.S. Senate will be on in New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
An advance unedited version of the annual UN Human Rights Committee evaluation of the United States, issued July 28, 2006, criticizes the U.S.for voting rights practices. Point 35 begins, “The Committee is concerned that about 5,000,000 adult citizens cannot vote due to a felony conviction”. Point 36 begins, “The Committee remains concerned that residents of the District of Columbia do not enjoy full representation in Congress, a restriction which does not seem to be compatible with article 25 of the Covenant.”
Daily Kos is probably the most-read political blog in the U.S (www.dailykos.com). On August 1, it headlined an item “Pa-Sen: Greens Working for Santorum”, and linked to Pennsylvania newspaper stories that say the only reason the Green Party was able to obtain 100,000 signatures on its ballot access petition was that Republicans donated to the Green Party and its nominees. Underneath the quotes from these stories, DailyKos summarized the story with this sentence, “The Greens Are Now Actively Working to enable Santorum and the GOP Agenda.”
There are three groups of partially or wholly disenfranchised adult citizens in the U.S.: (1) inhabitants of the territories and commonwealths, who are unable to vote for president or congress even though they must obey the laws passed by congress; (2) ex-felons and felons in certain states; (3) members of minor parties in certain states.
DailyKos does not hold itself out to be a blog about election law. Daily Kos seems never to have expressed any concern about the voting rights of any of the three disenfranchised, or partially disenfranchised, groups of adult U.S. citizens. However, when any influential medium attacks a political party for running candidates, on the grounds that such candidacy hurts the Democratic Party’s nominees, that provides fuel for Democratic state legislators around the nation to make the ballot access laws stricter.