On January 24, a visiting California Superior Court Judge from Orange County will hold a hearing in the case over who won the San Diego mayoral election.
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The US Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Ralph Nader’s Oregon ballot access case at its conference of February 18. A decision as to whether that Court will accept the case will probably be announced on February 21. The issue is whether it is constitutional for an election official to create new rules for petition validity, after the petition has already been submitted. Kucera v Bradbury, no. 04-872.
Yesterday, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office corrected a small but irritating problem with that state’s official 2004 election returns on the web.
Michael Badnarik and Michael Peroutka appeared on the Ohio ballot with the label “other-party candidate”, in accordance with a law passed in 2002. Although it seems silly that they didn’t have the labels “Libertarian” and “Constitution”, even “other-party candidate” on the ballot was an improvement under the old law, which said they could have no label at all.
But, until January 20, the Ohio Secretary of State election returns on the web labeled Badnarik and Peroutka as “non-partisan”, an absurd label for two candidates who were the nominees of political parties. The Secretary of State web page was corrected after complaints, so that it now bears the same labels that were on the November ballot.
On January 18, the new chief of the New Mexico Elections Department, Ernest Ortega, told the New Mexico Libertarian Party that it is still ballot-qualified. However, this decision isn’t in writing yet. The Libertarian Party had thought it was disqualified in November 2004 for failing to poll one-half of 1% of the vote for president. It had only polled .31% for president.
The law is very confusing and has been interpreted in contrary ways in the past. It says a party is disqualified “If two successive general elections are held without at least one of the party’s candidates on the ballot or if the total votes cast for the party’s candidates for governor or president, provided that the party has a candidate seeking election to either of those offices, in a general election do not equal one-half of 1% for governor or president, as applicable.” The party did not have a candidate for governor on the ballot in 2002.
On January 19, Oklahoma Representative Marian Cooksey introduced House Bill 1429, which greatly eases ballot access for minor parties. Current law requires 5% of the last vote cast, which for 2006 is a staggering 73,188 valid signatures. The bill would reduce this to 5,000 signatures, which was the requirement in Oklahoma between 1924 and 1974. The bill also lowers the number of votes needed for a party to remain on the ballot, from 10% for president or governor (whichever was most recent) to 1%.