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| SOCIALIST PARTY USA 2008 MOORE-ALEXANDER PRESIDENTIAL TICKET QUALIFIED FOR OFFICIAL WRITE-IN STATUS IN MICHIGAN | ||
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SOCIALIST PARTY USA 2008 MOORE-ALEXANDER PRESIDENTIAL TICKET QUALIFIED FOR OFFICIAL WRITE-IN STATUS IN MICHIGAN SOCIALIST TICKET AMONG THE ONLY TWO PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS WITH THE STATE-RECOGNITION REQUIRED TO HAVE WRITE-IN VOTES COUNTED ON MICHIGAN BALLOTS IN NOVEMBER. MOORE AND KEYES CAMPAIGNS ARE THE FIRST TWO PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS TO QUALIFY FOR OFFICIAL WRITE-IN STATUS IN MICHIGAN SINCE 2000 LANSING -- The Michigan Secretary of State's Bureau of Elections confirmed yesterday that the 2008 Socialist Party USA ticket of Brian Moore for President and Stewart Alexander for Vice President has now qualified for official write-in status in the state of Michigan. The qualification establishes that all Michigan counties are now required to count write-in votes cast for the Moore-Alexander ticket and that each county will be informed of this requirement by the Secretary of State's Office in Lansing. The campaign's write-in qualification also establishes that the Socialist Party presidential ticket's vote totals will be published in the listing of election results on the Michigan Secretary of State website, municipal government websites, and printed elsewhere where election results are officially provided. Michigan law requires that all write-in candidates for any office qualify for Official Write-in Status prior to the November Election in order to have even a single vote legally counted and reported in state or municipal election results. The SP Moore-Alexander campaign is among only two presidential tickets to qualify for Official Write-in Status in Michigan for the 2008 election. Michigan's absurdly restrictive ballot access laws resulted in a particularly odd pairing for Michigan write-in qualification in the 2008 presidential campaign of the campaign most explicitly representing movements of social progress, with the campaign that is perhaps the most unrestrained in its reflexive identification with social reaction. The other campaign, which reportedly filed on the same date as that of the Socialist Party is ultra-rightist, Reagan-appointed former U.S. ambassador and 2004 Illinois Republican-nominated U.S. Senatorial candidate Alan Keys. The last presidential ticket to qualify for Official Write-in Status in Michigan prior to these two campaigns this year was the campaign of Pat Buchanan in 2000. No presidential candidates qualified for Official Write-in Status in Michigan in 2004, although several campaigns that lacked Michigan ballot qualification campaigned in the state that year. The Michigan Bureau of Elections requires that a presidential ticket seeking to qualify for Official Write-in Status in the State file a signed and notarized Declaration of Intent form, a designation of the Vice Presidential Candidate (if applicable), and a list of the names and addresses of seventeen presidential electors for the campaign, which must be comprised of one presidential elector who is presently registered to vote in each of Michigan's fifteen congressional districts and two presidential electors representing the state at-large. Moore, like 2004 SP presidential candidate Walter Brown, sent his Declaration of Intent form to the Socialist Party of Michigan which then combined it with the necessary vice presidential candidate designation and a slate of Socialist Party members in each Michigan Congressional district to serve as the geographically distributed slate of Michigan presidential electors for the filing. While the filing deadline for candidates seeking write-in status for all other offices in Michigan this year is the second Friday immediately preceding the election, the state set the much earlier filing deadline for write-in presidential candidates this year as last Friday, September 5th. The Socialist Party has been denied ballot access as a political party in Michigan for many decades, despite it's over century long history of participation, including a number of major electoral victories, in Michigan elections. As a result, the Socialist Party of Michigan has run candidates on the Michigan ballot each election year either as independents or jointly through the ballot lines of other qualified parties. In 2004 the Socialist Party presidential ticket qualified for the Michigan ballot through the ballot line of the Natural Law Party, which had dissolved as a political party earlier that year. This year, however, the Ralph Nader campaign persuaded the remaining officer for the Michigan Natural Law Party ballot line to nominate his campaign, presumably in seeking to avoid a repeat of his 2004 campaign's struggles to qualify for the Michigan ballot that continued long after the Socialist Party presidential ticket had already made the Michigan ballot through the sudden dissolution of the NLP. This year, the Socialist Party is running three other candidates for office in Michigan in addition to its presidential campaign: Jean Treacy for U.S. Congress in the 1st District, covering the state's upper and northern lower peninsulas (treacy2008.org), Dwain Reynolds for State Board of Education (dreynolds2008.org) who will appear on all General Election ballots in the state, and Matt Erard for 53rd District State Representative (erard2008.org) covering Ann Arbor. All three of this year's candidates nominated by the Socialist Party at the state level are qualified for the November ballot through their joint nomination of the Green Party of Michigan, and are dually identifying as the candidates of both parties in their campaigns. Since the last election, the Socialist Party of Michigan led the founding of the Michigan Third Parties Coalition, a coalition of the state's five most well-known minor parties from across the political spectrum, which is seeking state legislative sponsorship for a bill it drafted to lower the state's requirement for minor party ballot qualification to the signatures of 5,000 registered voters in the state. "The fact that the presidential ticket -- representing the third oldest nationally organized party in the U.S., the only presently existent minor party ever to elect a candidate to the U.S. Congress or as the mayor of a major Michigan city -- is barred from appearing on the Michigan ballot is just one more example of the utterly cynical contempt held by the two corporate parties running the state legislature for the most elementary principles of democracy," said Erard, who noted that the waive of highly prohibitive ballot access laws established in states across the U.S. in the mid 20th Century were designed specifically to keep socialist candidates off state election ballots -- and that Michigan's ballot access laws are presently among the nation's most draconian. "The most important thing of all, however, is that Michigan voters have the right to vote Socialist in this presidential election and have their votes count, which, albeit through far less preferable or democratically equitable means, is a right we will once again this year have a means of exercising. In the current period economic-political period in the U.S., it's the working class of Michigan that is struggling the hardest and facing the sharpest brunt of attacks from this nation's ruling corporate elite. Accordingly, it is Michigan's working class majority that needs its own movement-fostering, political independence-affirming, and future-focused Socialist alternative in this presidential election the very most," Erard said. Erard expressed confidence, but slight concern about whether votes for the ticket would be counted accurately in Michigan this year, since he points out that in many states, the vast majority of write-in votes are never recorded, even for candidates who have qualified as write-in candidates in such states. When Buchanan ran in 2000 as the last candidate to qualify for Michigan write-in status, however, he was ultimately reported by the state to have received 1,851 write-in votes in Michigan, a number vastly higher than what write-in presidential candidates typically receive in most states, even those who are well-known. Buchanan's Michigan write-in totals from 2000 are in relatively close proximity to the number of write-in votes that Socialist Party presidential tickets have received in North Carolina in recent elections, presumably due to the fact that, since North Carolina uniquely requires presidential campaigns to collect at least 500 valid signatures from registered NC voters just to qualify for write-in status in the state, it takes its write-in counting obligations a bit more seriously than many other states. Erard suggested that the reference point of Michigan's most recently recorded presidential write-in vote totals from 2000 would suggest that Michigan is among the more law-abiding states with respect to counting write-in votes for qualified presidential candidates, but that he doesn't believe the Michigan Party or this year's presidential campaign would hesitate in pursuing whatever courses of legal action are available to defend their voters' rights if the level of indisputable disenfranchisement of write-in voters that has been so prevalent in recent presidential elections in other states, were to take place in Michigan this November. "Certainly those kinds of write-in vote totals from 2000 in Michigan and for our presidential campaigns in North Carolina are a far cry, for example, from the total of two votes our NYC-headquartered party's presidential ticket was officially reported to have received in the entire state of New York in 2000 and then its subsequent 100% decline from there in 2004 in which the state reported zero votes in New York for our presidential campaign! North Carolina most certainly isn't well over 1,000 times further to the left than New York, although with regard to Buchanan's 2000 Michigan write-in vote, let's also hope Michigan didn't turn so reactionary that it had it really had a thousand times that number of Buchanan voters!" Erard said. Yesterday's certification of the campaign's Official Write-in Status in Michigan came upon the same day that the Socialist Party presidential ticket qualified for the state ballot in Wisconsin, as the most recent of its ballot access achievements this year. The campaign won a landmark victory in court on August 21st when a federal judge ordered its placement on the Ohio ballot on the basis of the Socialist Party's demonstrated historical and contemporary support. In addition to Wisconsin and Ohio, the campaign is thus far ballot-qualified for the 2008 election in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont. It expects to qualify for the state ballots of Louisiana, Minnesota, and Mississippi as early as today and may qualify for additional ballots beyond these eleven through further judicial action. In addition to Michigan, it is currently qualified for write-in status in Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas and expects to qualify for official write-in status in another twenty-two states in the coming month. Moore last made a campaign stop in Michigan on July 13th during the Socialist Party's 2008 National Organizing Conference held in Ann Arbor. He hopes to make a more expansive campaign trip through Michigan, including Detroit and Flint, during the coming months of the campaign. Vice Presidential candidate Stewart Alexander, previously of New Baltimore, Michigan and now of California, will likely also peg his former home state for a campaign visit before Election Day. An interview with Alexander, in which he discusses struggles of Michigan workers and some of his own experiences growing up in the state, is featured in the current issue of The Michigan Socialist magazine, which can be freely downloaded or ordered in print through the website of the Socialist Party of Michigan. More information on the 2008 Socialist Party presidential campaign of Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander can be found on the campaign website. CONTACT:
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