On October 3, three of the candidates on the ballot for U.S. Senate in Idaho debated each other. See this story. They were the Republican and Democratic nominees, and the independent candidate, Scott Cleveland. The Libertarian Party and Constitution Party nominees were not invited into the debate.
The Democratic Party has fewer candidates on the November ballot this year for state legislature than any election since 2004. Nebraska is excluded from this calculation, because it has non-partisan elections for State Legislature. For California and Washington, the top-two states, districts with two Democrats on the November ballot are counted just once.
Ballot Access News has been keeping track of the number of legislative candidates from each party starting in 2002. More detail will be in the November 1 print edition of B.A.N.
Brazil held an election on October 2. See the wikipedia article here. For president, eleven candidates were on the ballot. No one got a majority, so a runoff will be held October 30.
For the Chamber of Deputies, which has 513 members, twenty-three parties won at least one seat.
For the Senate, which has 108 members, fifteen parties won at least one seat.
The Idaho Constitution Party has been continuously on the ballot starting in 1996, although in its first few years on the ballot, its name was the U.S. Taxpayers Party. In 2020 it has more nominees for federal and state office than it has ever had before. It has nominees for U.S. Senate, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Controller, six State Senate seats, and four State House seats.
It has more nominees on the ballot than any Idaho minor party since 2002, when the Idaho Libertarian Party had 36 nominees for federal and state office.
On October 4, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Merrill v Milligan, 21-1086. It lasted two hours. There will be many news stories about the oral argument. Here is the Reuters story, which isn’t very detailed. The issue is whether the 3-judge U.S. District Court was correct early this year when he invalidated the Alabama U.S. House districting plan under the federal Voting Rights Act. The 3-judge court had required Alabama to draw two districts with Black majorities, instead of just one. Then the U.S. Supreme Court had stayed that decision, in a 5-4 vote.
UPDATE: see this analysis by Professor Rick Hasen, posted at electionlawblog.
FURTHER UPDATE: here is the transcript.
