On January 5, Congressman Mel Watt of North Carolina resigned from the U.S. House. On January 6, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory said the special election to fill his seat will be held on November 4, 2014. See this story. The Governor said it would be too expensive to hold a special election earlier.
McCrory is a Republican. The seat is considered a safe Democratic seat, and Watt is a Democrat. UPDATE: see this analysis of the state’s decision to postpone the election until November 2014.
The Atlanta Progressive News has this story about two civic activists who hope to get on the ballot for State House in 2014 as independent candidates. For more about attorney Randy L. New, see here. For more about Bill Bozarth, see here.
December 31, 2013, was the deadline for Americans Elect to increase its registration to one-fifteenth of 1%, if it wanted to avoid being removed from the California ballot. Leaders of Americans Elect were aware of this deadline, but took no action to increase the party’s registration, so the party is now disqualified. The official announcement won’t be until the Report of Registration is complete, but it is obvious from partial data from certain counties that Americans Elect has only approximately 5,000 registrants or fewer, and it needs approximately 12,000 to remain on the ballot.
The only other parties that were ever removed from the California ballot on the grounds that they failed to have registration of one-fifteenth of 1% of the state total, at the beginning of an election year, were the Communist Party in early 1944, and the Prohibition Party in early 1964. The one-fifteenth of 1% registration test is in addition to the vote test that is imposed in November of midterm years. The legislature added the one-fifteenth of 1% registration test in 1943, for the purpose of removing the Communist Party from the ballot. The party kept passing the vote test and the legislature wanted to eliminate it, so added that second test.
This George Will column is a virtual encyclopedia about the relative strength of the Democratic and Republican Parties at this point in U.S. history. The column has no thesis or recommendation; it is just a fascinating compendium of important facts. One of the most interesting points in the column is the observation that ever since 1860, the only two Democratic presidents succeeded in office by another Democratic president have been Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Yet there have been eleven Republican presidents succeeded by another Republican president.
On December 3, 2013, Washington, D.C. city councilmember Mary Cheh introduced B20-0602. It would provide for an election for Attorney General for the District of Columbia, to be held November 4, 2014. It would provide that any individual could petition for a place on the general election ballot. The party affiliation of each candidate would be listed on the ballot. Whoever got the most votes would win.
In 2010, the voters passed a Charter Amendment. The language on the 2010 ballot said that starting in 2014, D.C. voters would elect an Attorney General for the District. The entire charter amendment was too long to print on the 2010 ballot, and the full amendment itself does not say that the first election for this office would be 2014, but since the ballot did mention that the election would be in 2014, there has been a controversy about whether the election should be held in 2014.
At first the city government took the position that the first election would be in 2018. Paul Zukerberg, an attorney who wants to run for that office in 2014, then sued to force the first election for this office to be held in 2014. The Cheh bill, if passed, would provide for a 2014 election. But the Cheh bill is also controversial because the charter amendment says the election should be partisan, and because the legal definition of “partisan election” has always been murky, it is not clear that an election with no party nominees, but with party labels on the ballot, is a “partisan election.”
So far, no hearing has been held on the Cheh bill. There is time urgency, because the D.C. primary is on April 1, 2014. The lawsuit filed by Zukerberg in the D.C. superior court may have a hearing soon, but so far no court date has been set. In the meantime, the D.C. Board of Elections permitted Zukerberg to file for the Democratic primary, and listed him on its list of candidates. He is the only Democrat who filed for the Democratic primary for that office. No one filed in the Republican, Statehood Green, or Libertarian primaries for that office. If a court rules in favor of Zukerberg, and says that a 2014 election must be held in which parties nominate candidates, presumably other candidates for Attorney General could run write-in campaigns in the primaries for that office.
David Waddell, the only Constitution Party office-holder in North Carolina, says he will run for U.S. Senate in 2014 in North Carolina as a write-in candidate. He was elected to the Indian Trail city council on November 8, 2011, in a non-partisan election.
He is the first Constitution Party member to run for statewide office in North Carolina, other than presidential elector candidates. The Constitution Party has never been on the ballot in North Carolina because of the ballot access laws.
Waddell has also submitted his resignation from the city council. He garnered publicity by submitting the resignation letter in Klingon. See this story.