Cornel West Will Seek the Green Party Presidential Nomination

Posted on by June 14, 2023
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On June 13, Cornel West tweeted, “In the spirit of a broad United Front and Coalition strategy, I am pursuing the nomination of the Green Party for president of the United States. I thank the volunteers of the People’s Party for the initial launch.” His website is CornelWest24.com.

The best-known example of a presidential candidate who had the nomination of multiple parties was U.S. Senator Robert La Follette in 1924. He had the nomination of the Socialist Party and also of the Farmer-Labor Party, as well as his independent candidacy using the label “Progressive”. Voters could choose which label to support La Follette in Colorado, Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

Pretrial Conference Postponed in Libertarian National Committee Trademark Lawsuit in Virginia

Posted on by June 15, 2023
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On June 12, the U.S. District Court postponed the pretrial conference in Libertarian National Committee v Dean, e.d., 2:23cv-155. This is the case in which the Libertarian National Committee is suing Robert Klor Dean and his Tidewater Libertarian Party over trademark law. The conference had been set for June 15, but now it is postponed. No new date has been set yet. UPDATE: the conference is now set for June 22.

Approval Voting Initiative Circulates in Missouri

Posted on by June 13, 2023
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Missouri Agrees, a campaign of the organization Show Me Integrity (SMI), is now circulating a petition that would place an initiative on the November 2024 ballot in that state to mandate Approval Voting for all federal, state, and local elections. A volunteer petitioning effort is underway, but SMI thinks it needs to start a paid petition drive by July 1 for this initiative petition to succeed. The estimated cost of that is $1.2 million. SMI has located a potential donor who had pledged $600,000, with the proviso that the other $600,000 be raised first.

This is the Missouri Agrees website:

https://www.missouriagrees.org

SMI will be holding a Zoom call on this effort on Thursday, June 15, from 2:00 to 2:20PM Central Time. SMI would like interested parties to RSVP at this link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvcO2rqjkrGtzh8HJEOP2eOe0OZiWjjX4h#/registration

 

A Single District Fix for Gerrymandering

Posted on by June 13, 2023
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On June 13, on electionlawblog.org, Ned Foley, Professor of Law at Ohio State, posted a paper forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal titled “Self-Districting: The Ultimate Antidote to Gerrymandering.” In the article, he reminds us that districts do not have to be geography-based. A district can be a subset of a state’s entire population and can be formed by like-minded individuals who can voluntarily organize and form a political district that is not necessarily geographically continuous. A person’s neighbors may be in his political district or be in a different district in a self-districting plan. While this would not affect certain elections (e.g., the single US House race in Wyoming), in elections with many seats to be decided (e.g., US House elections in California or the houses of all state legislatures), individuals in currently unelectable political minorities (e.g., Libertarians and Greens) could band together to elected representatives in single district elections and win seats in legislatures. The self-districting aspect of this plan would do away with state legislatures’ power to draw political district boundaries.

Here is Mr. Foley’s current paper on this topic:

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