On October 18, Christina Pascucci announced her candidacy for U.S. Senate from California. She is a Democrat and has potential to poll a sizeable vote. See this Politico story.
8
On October 18, leaders of the ballot-qualified Independence Party of South Carolina announced that the party is merging with the Forward Party (which is not on the ballot) and the South Carolina Independence Party will change its name to the Forward Party.
This makes the third state in which the Forward Party is ballot-qualified. The other two are Florida and Utah.
The South Carolina Independence Party was originally put on the ballot in 1996 and was named the Reform Party. It changed its name to Independence in 2004.
In 2004 it nominated Ralph Nader for president, and in 2016 it nominated Evan McMullin for president. Those are the only two elections since it ceased being the Reform Party in which it had presidential nominees.
South Carolina makes it very easy for qualified parties to remain qualified. They just need to run at least one nominee for some federal or state office every four years. The state’s policy of letting parties change their names has been helpful to new parties in the past. When the Natural Law Party decided to cease to exist, the South Carolina Natural Law Party kindly changed its name to the Green Party, so that the Green Party became qualified in South Carolina.
On October 18, an Arizona State Appeals Court issued an opinion in Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v Crosby, CA-cv-2022-0136. The decision upholds a trial court decision that says Cochise County can’t count all ballots by hand.
Arizona law already allows for counties to choose some precincts at random and hand-count all the ballots in those precincts, in order to check the accuracy of vote-counting machines.
On Friday, October 20, the Connecticut Supreme Court will hear the dispute over the Independent Party involvement in the Danbury election for Mayor and other city office. That election is November 7, 2023. See this story.
The Independent Party held two nominating conventions recently to nominate candidates for Danbury office. One convention nominated the Republican slate, and the other meeting nominated the Democratic slate. Connecticut permits fusion.
On October 17, the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee passed two similar bills that let independents vote in primaries. HB 976 only applies to independent voters; HB 979 applies to independent voters and also registered members of parties that don’t have their own primaries.
Both bills were supported by all Democrats on the committee. All Republicans on the committee voted against the bills.