Constitution Party Still Whining to Courts; Candidate Deleting Attacks

The South Dakota Constitution Party continues its futile search for an activist judge to give it preferential treatment under South Dakota election law. The Constitution Party is asking the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Judge Roberto Lange's decision that the Constitution Party failed to follow the legal requirements to place candidates on South Dakota's statewide ballot.

The only point of this appeal is publicity. The law is solid, as is Judge Lange's ruling. Secretary of State Chris Nelson has already drawn the ballot order. The only Constitution Party candidate you'll see on the South Dakota this November is Lori Stacey, who will get 1% of the vote for Secretary of State.

Speaking of Lori, her lawyers must be too busy writing up the ballot appeal to bother with her faux-legal grumblings. Last week she posted a threat to sue "a particular blogger" for libel. I merely mentioned that threat here on the blog Saturday. (O.K., I mentioned it, then laughed at it.) I also left some blogging advice and recommended a lawyer in Stacey's comment section. By Monday morning, that threat had disappeared Stacey's Sioux Falls Conservative Examiner blog.

Interestingly, Stacey had replaced that post with a gripe about South Dakota Right to Life's choosing to endorse Republican Jason Gant for Secretary of State rather than herself. "SD Right To Life chooses partisan politics over principles," read the headline, dated August 29. This morning, that post is gone, too. Politifi scraped up the opening lines here, as did Worldnews.

Google result for Lori Stacey's now-deleted blog post on Jason Gant
and the hypocrisy of SD Right to Life, 2010.08.31, 09:37 CDT

I can't wait to hear Lori Stacey in the debates against Gant and Ben Nesselhuf, just to hear her start every rebuttal with, "No, wait, never mind what I said two minutes ago. I didn't really say that."

I would honestly enjoy the rise of a serious third party to challenge America's two-party system (or, arguably, in South Dakota's case, the one-party system). Alas, the Constitution Party demonstrates at every turn they don't have the chops to fill that serious role.

Constitution Party SOS Candidate Stacey Threatens to Sue "A Particular Blogger"

Hey, I'm the only blog in the state giving Lori Stacey headlines, and this is the thanks I get? Where's the love?

Here's a sure sign Lori Stacey's Constitution Party campaign for Secretary of State is going nowhere. When she could be campaigning hard, promoting sensible ideas for good government, and establishing her credibility so voters might actually consider entrusting her with managing our elections, Lori Stacey instead is whimpering about "a particular blogger" saying things that make her mad.

Now understand, Lori Stacey can't even blog effectively, let alone run a statewide election. She does not name the source of her frustration. She provides no hyperlinks to the text in question. She provides no information to help blog readers access the original evidence on which she bases her claims and make their own evaluations. Blogs are all about helping people find information and "see for themselves"; Stacey leaves her readers wallowing in her own pile of grimacing goo as she rages about hate crimes and exploring "possible legal action."

Why does the thought of "possible legal action" by Constitution Party lawyers inspire laughter rather than fear? Oh, I don't know... past performance?

In celebration of the blog ethos, I'll simply link Stacey's yowling and the blog post that appears to incur her wrath and let y'all waste your weekend making your own evaluation. But I will say this: Lori Stacey's reliance on cowardly revisionism and Merriam-Webster to build a legal case makes me laugh.

Candidate Stacey, if you really want to take to the hustings and decry the evil nameless blog impugning your political positions, then by all means, Lori, knock yourself out with that. Such brittle thin-skinnedness will only support what 99% of South Dakotans already know: the last thing we want is the Constitution Party running our state government.

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Update 2010.08.30 11:28 CDT: Guess who backed down? Lori Stacey's post threatening libel action has disappeared. For the record, here's what Stacey wrote that inspired my above post... someone threw her text down the memory hole (thank you again, Google cache):

As a Constitutionalist, I have been a defender of Freedom of Speech and oppose most "Hate Crimes" legislation as it goes so far that it has become a danger to all of our rights to freedom of speech. However, there unfortunately comes a time that some writings can be so blatantly false, personally offending, defamatory and widely spread without any factual basis that it constitutes malicious, reckless intent and rises to the level of a crime called Libel.

As defined by online version of Merriam-Webster:

"Main Entry: ¹li·bel

Pronunciation: \?l?-b?l\

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, written declaration, from Anglo-French, from Latin libellus, diminutive of liber book

Date: 14th century

1 a : a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought b archaic : a handbill especially attacking or defaming someone
2 a : a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression b (1) : a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt (2) :(3) : the publication of blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene writings or pictures (4) : the act, tort, or crime of publishing such a libel" defamation of a person by written or representational means

I do not push my deeply-held religious beliefs on anyone and respect an individual's right of free will to believe or not to believe for even God freely gives us this choice. Because I have increasingly become the victim of such patently false, libelous statements derived from such enormously illogical conclusions that no reasonable person could have possibly derived, I am now choosing to be silent no longer and will defend myself to set the record straight.

In a particular blogger's imagination, just because 1 of several sources that I sent him to present evidence of my point in a debate which actually had absolutely NOTHING to do with religion, there was a short YouTube clip in which the first few SECONDS showed a picture of Jesus and supposedly the FILM MAKER denies the existence of Christ. This blogger then went on to print, publish and republish outrageous lies that state that I supposedly believe Jesus is a hoax. This is outrageously false, baseless and libelous considering I have been a Christian my entire life.

1. FALSE: "She promotes an online film denying the existence of Christ"

TRUTH: I have never even seen but a couple short clips of this film and have never watched the entire movie myself. In fact, there are so many other sources of information, some of which I sent in this exchange. It was the only time that I can recall even using a clip from it. To publish that I PROMOTE it is an absolute lie. To conclude that someone agrees with a filmmaker's supposed personal views just because you have seen an 8-10 minute clip of one of their movies is a conclusion that defies all reasonable logic.

2. FALSE: "She believes Jesus Christ is a hoax".

TRUTH: I have been a Christian my entire life going as far back in my childhood as I can possibly recall. In my adult life, I have had at least 2 miraculous events that saved me from nearly losing my life which has strengthened my belief to the point that I can never deny.

3. FALSE: I supposedly refused to ever publish this person's first initial rude, mean-spirited comment.

TRUTH: This system that we had been using AUTOMATICALLY published comments that are made and I left this comment up for a minimum of 24 hrs. It was one of less than a handful that I have ever manually removed before it AUTOMATICALLY disappears from easily viewable sight after 7 days. Now, Examiner is launching an entirely new system in which comments and other sections will be handled differently and we do not know the full extent of all of these changes at this point.

With all that said, I am not holding my breath to see any retractions as these libelous statements have increasingly continued to be smeared throughout the internet over the past year. If sufficient corrections are not made promptly, possible legal action will be explored.

I have not been able to retrieve the two comments I left Ms. Stacey on this post. I can't help speculating she didn't like them very much.

Constitution Party Lacks Know-How, Gets No Howe on Ballot

As expected, U.S. District Court Judge Roberto Lange ruled against the Constitution Party's lawsuit to get its statewide candidates on the South Dakota ballot. The Constitution Party failed to find 250 party members who would sign a petition to nominate a gubernatorial candidate, so the party sued, saying they and any other small group of friends who get a wild hair ought to be able to declare themselves a political party and put candidates on the ballot. Some small fraction of the Constitution Party's members gathered for a "convention" in June to name Joy Howe of Brandon their candidate for governor and asked Judge Lange to order her name added to the statewide ballot

Judge Lange declined, saying the signature requirement is perfectly constitutional: "The fact that signatures from 250 party members represent such a high percentage of Constitution Party members reflects the limited size of the Constitution Party of South Dakota rather than any violation of the Equal Protection Clause." Judge Lange also pulled the rug out from under Howe by saying neither she nor any other party member had standing to pursue the lawsuit, since no party member actually submitted a nominating petition to have it rejected by the state under the law they challenged. (Hey, if anyone has a copy of the ruling, send it my way! I'd love to read it.)

Now the only candidate the 315 members of the Constitution Party have to rally around is dedicated conspiracy theorist Lori Stacey, who wants to take over the Secretary of State's office. Their District 12 State Senate candidate Slade Ammann withdrew, as did their District 33 House candidate; the only CP'er left on the ballot is Charles E. Drews for District 9 House (only info I can find on him: the South Dakota Gun Owners survey, where Drews says he thinks packing heat in church is a fine idea).

If the Constitution Party wants to put candidates on the statewide ballot, it should drop the lawsuits and conspiracy theories and develop a practical agenda for governing that resonates with the public and gets people to see the party as something more than a sideshow.

Lori Stacey, Consti-spiracy-Theory Party Candidate for Secretary of State

The South Dakota Constitution Party will have its lawsuit challenging candidate petition signature requirements laughed out of court next week. (O.K., so U.S. District Court Judge and MHS debate alum Roberto Lange will probably have enough class not to laugh out loud.)

But the Constitution Party still promises comic relief through the rest of the 2010 election season, courtesy of the one candidate they managed to muster for the statewide ballot, Secretary of State candidate Lori Stacey. Attentive readers will recall Stacey as the woman who not only lacks basic counting skills (a rather important qualification for someone in charge of elections) but also adheres to the following tenets of beyond-Glenn-Beck paranoia (and I quote Stacey's five points verbatim from a September 2009 e-mail):

1. The dollar will be replaced by an IMF World Currency.
2. Bush signed documents in March of 2005 to merge the US with Canada and Mexico BY 2010, they will pretend that is an all of a sudden solution when our economy crashes very soon.
3. 9/11 was a complete fraud and vehicle to terrorize our own citizens into giving up our freedoms in the name of security.
4. FEMA is not your friend!
5. As one human being to another, DON'T TAKE ANY VACCINE.

Hmm... calls 9/11 a trick by Uncle Sam, denies science to flog hysteria that may be killing babies, and expects North American Union to happen this year (six months down, and I'm not speak Spanish or Quebecois yet, eh?). Oh yeah, and she promotes an online film denying the existence of Jesus. With candidates like Lori Stacey, it's no wonder the Constitution Party can't recruit enough members to collect 250 signatures for a gubernatorial candidate.

Stacey appears to buy into the birther craziness (perhaps not unlike our current Secretary of State?). On her blog, she writes, "We must never again allow any Presidential Candidate onto any ballot in South Dakota that can not prove they are Natural Born as our Constitution demands." But at least she's an equal opporuntity birther: she believes that neither President Barack Hussein Obama nor Senator John McCain is a natural born citizen. It's all one big conspiracy, Democrats and Republicans, working together... to elect foreigners?

Like so many other talk-radio-karaoke posers, she vows in her campaign URL to Take America Back... but from whom? Chris Nelson? The Rounds-Daugaard Administration? Commie atheist punks like me who are natural-born citizens but don't deserve to be since we disagree with the Constitution Party?

Now I can sympathize with Stacey's concerns about electronic voting machines and the potential for abuse. She wants to ban electronic voting machines completely. My man Congressman Dennis Kucinich has expressed similar concerns. Update 14:40 CDT: Bob Mercer notes Stacey's proposal to go back to hand-counting every ballot. I'd love to hear the conservative Stacey's fiscal analysis of how many more people county government will have to hire to eyeball all those ballots. (Next headline: Constitution Party Backs Bigger Government?)

Stacey agrees with Kucinich and me that the Patriot Act is really, really bad. I can also sympathize with Stacey's complaint that the two major parties have too much control over the electoral process. I would like to see Independents and new parties have a fairer shot at establishing themselves and participating in the election process and government. But all the ballot reform in the world won't help fringe conspiracy-theorist candidates like Lori Stacey establish their parties as credible political forces.

I can't wait to see this woman on a stage answering questions next to Ben Nesselhuf and Jason Gant. Try not to laugh, fellas.

Constitution Party Gets Law, Constitution Wrong

...and supports out-of-state interlopers!

I'm reading the Constitution Party's lawsuit against Secretary of State Chris Nelson (and all of us). It's a fun read, but it won't win over any judges.

Right off the bat, the CP misinterprets South Dakota Codified Law:

The first allegation of a constitutional violation of S.D. Codified Laws 12-5-1.4 avers as unconstitutional the requirement that governor candidates of new political parties obtain 250 signatures of voters registered to vote as members of the new political party while established political parties need obtain signatures equal to only 1% of their party membership. Compare SD Codified Laws 12-5-1.4(1) with S.D. Codified Laws 12-6-7.

O.K., let's compare. SDCL 12-6-7 says petitioners for political public office must get signatures from a number of fellow party members not less than 1% of the number of votes their party's gubernatorial candidate got in their county, district, etc., in the last election. Now that is a potentially misleading statistic to use as the basis for signatures from your own party: the number of votes your party's gubernatorial candidate gets may include a number of Independents and folks from the other party. It's also worth noting that this signature rule actually favors the losers of the last election: Jack Billion's 2-to-1 loss to Mike Rounds in 2006 made it that much easier for Dems to get on this year's ballot (and we still didn't do it in several districts! Grrr!).

But SDCL 12-6-7 does not contradict or supersede 12-5-1.4, which establishes the additional requirement for statewide candidates to get at least 250 signatures. This additional condition is just like the requirement in Robert's Rules of Order of a 2/3 majority to move the previous question or a 1/3 second to consider an amendment. Such rules prevent a determined but tiny minority from throwing too many monkey wrenches into the system. If you can't find 250 people—0.05% of vote-eligible South Dakotans—to back your campaign, that's probably a sign that your candidacy isn't worth the ink we taxpayers would spend to print your name on the ballot... or to print the extra pages we'd need to fit all the yahoos like me who would run if we could just call ourselves a party, get three signatures, and "run for governor." (Web Wobblies in 2014!)

I do find the Constitution Party's second argument intriguing: the 250-signature minimum makes it impossible for the CP to have more than one candidate in the primary, since they only have 300-some registered members. Of course, I would suggest they still get it wrong: it's not the law that makes a CP primary impossible; it's the CP's failure to round up 500 or more members.

Connected with this argument is the contention that, given the current numerical impossibility of two CP candidates filing for the same statewide office and competing in a primary, a CP gubernatorial candidate should not have to file petitions by the primary deadline at the end of March but by the general election deadline of the beginning of June. I almost like that argument; however, it assumes that the CP will not enjoy recruiting success and end up with enough registered voters to support two candidates.

Suppose the CP's argument flew and we moved the party petition deadline to June. Suppose I then hear Constitution Party candidate Joy Howe is circulating petitions to run for governor. On April 1, after the primary filing deadline, I decide to throw a monkey wrench in the works and run for the same office. I switch my voter registration to Constitution (I might need a stiff drink), take out petitions, and encourage my friends to switch to Constitution and sign for me. I get 250 people to switch and sign (and don't think I couldn't!). We file by June 1, same day that Joy Howe trundles into Chris Nelson's office with her box of petitions. Uh oh! Now the Constitution Party has two candidates and no primary.

Oops—that's why the law sets the deadline for all parties back at the end of March. The law is actually more optimistic than the Constitution Party: it assumes a party might actually grow and win popular support.

The CP also throws in a surprise issue utterly non-germane to the main complaint: they grumble about the prohibition of non-residents circulating petitions in South Dakota. Here the Constitution Party seems to be trying to open the door for outside agitators like plaintiff and Arizonan Mark Pickens to work to build the party where it has failed to generate sufficient grass-roots interest. Boo-hoo. Pickens also asserts his voting rights are infringed by the out-of-state petitioner ban.

Plaintiffs Joy Howe and Marvin Meyer assert that the 250-signature rule violates all sorts of rights: freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to run for office, even the right to vote for whom they want. Well, heck, if those arguments stand, I'm suing the South Dakota Democratic Party for not fielding U.S. Senate candidate. I might also sue Dr. Kevin Weiland for not filing his petitions in March. (I'm comin' for your wallet, Kevin! Better take out some more tonsils!)

This lawsuit goes nowhere. But thank you, Constitution Party, for some summer entertainment.

Constitution Party Sues for Slacker Ballot Rules

Today's Wienie Award goes to the South Dakota Constitution Party. They could only get a hundred-some of their 345 registered members to sign petitions to put their gubernatorial and Congressional placeholders on the ballot. (The CP is at 328 members as of May 24.) So they are suing Secretary of State Chris Nelson and the State of South Dakota, saying the 250-signature minimum requirement for statewide candidates is unconstitutional.

I would suggest that instead of turning to activist judges to overturn the law, the Constitution Party concentrate on offering viable candidates and reaonable political philosophy that might draw more than 0.06% of eligible South Dakota residents to join their party.

But maybe I should cut the Constitution Party some slack. Let them win their lawsuit. Let the court require South Dakota set proportional signature requirements for even the smallest parties. Then Bill Fleming, Sam Hurst, Kevin Weiland, and I will get together, resurrect the Socialist Party of South Dakota (we'll call ourselves Pettigrew's Pirates and meet at the Prairie Village Socialist Hall), and run one of us for governor every cycle. Yahoo!