From Ballot Access News:
Independent candidate Mark Bray, running for the U.S. House in Alabama’s 5th district, has qualified for the November ballot. See this story. He is the first independent candidate for Congress to appear on the Alabama ballot since 2006. The 5th district is the northern-most part of Alabama. If Bray had not qualified, the incumbent member of Congress would have been unopposed.
From the article cited:
The Alabama Secretary of State signed off on Mark Bray’s petition to get on the November ballot. Their office revealed that as of Saturday, Bray’s heavily-online campaign racked up more than 7,700 signatures on his petition; more than enough to qualify for the race.
Bray’s Facebook and Twitter pages say he is an engineer. He said he is running for Congress in hopes of being able to “change the conversation in Washington.”
“The people of this district have a choice,” Bray said. “I think they are clamoring for difference.”
Like Congressman Brooks, Bray calls himself a social conservative with plenty of common ground with the Tea Party, but disagrees with Brooks on the national deficit and debt. Bray said it is time to concentrate on the reasons for weakness in the economy, like over-regulation and the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies.
“We’ve got a basic argument between austerity, which is, ‘Let’s cut spending regardless of what it does to our economy,’ or inflationary practices, which essentially is stealing from the working man and making the cost of their goods and services go higher,” said Bray.