On Saturday afternoon, I had the opportunity to speak with Mark Hull-Richter over the telephone about his write-in campaign in California's 42nd congressional district this year. Should 3,000 people in the district write Hull-Richter on their ballots tomorrow, the Democrats will have a candidate in yet another district in which they were not previously running one. You can listen to the interview here (warning: a large .wav) or read the rush transcript below.

Jonathan Singer: Can you tell us a little bit about how it came to be that you're mounting a write-in campaign, how you decided to enter the race?

Mark Hull-Richter: Well, I was at the January meeting of the California Democratic Party's executive board and they announced there that they had all of the races in the covered. So a few weeks ago I went to look and see if that was actually the case because I had heard that the Democrat who'd filed for the 42nd had dropped out and there was nobody listed on the ballot, no write-ins filed or anything. And it just seemed to me that that was a poor way to run an election for the Democratic Party, so I filed.

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