Florida HB 1355, passed by the House on April 21, is 157 pages long. Among the changes is a provision that does not permit political parties to nominate anyone for any partisan office (other than president or presidential elector), if that person had been a registered member of another political party at any time during the year before filing to run for office.
The bill makes no exception for new parties. Therefore, a new party, formed in an election year, would not be permitted to have any nominees who had been members of another party for 18 months before the election. This part of the bill, if signed into law, would almost certainly be held unconstitutional. Similar laws in Oklahoma and Nevada were invalidated, as applied to new parties. The Oklahoma case was Crussel v Oklahoma State Election Board, 497 F Supp 646 (1980); the Nevada case was Long v Swackhamer, 538 P 2d 587 (1975). If a law like this had been in effect in 1854, the Republican Party would have been severely handicapped, because a great deal of Republicans elected that year had been Whigs or Democrats or Free Soilers immediately before the Republican Party was formed.
Courts in New Mexico and Colorado have ruled that it is unconstitutional for a state to tell a party that it can’t nominate a non-member. The Colorado case was Colorado Democratic Party v Meyer (1988); the New Mexico case was Woodruff v Herrera (2011).
Is FL the center of New Age party hack robot EVIL — as a result of Bush v. Gore 2000 ???
i.e. how many of the Fl Elephant in the Legislature are EVIL – akin to the Hitler folks in the Germany regime in 1933 ??
P.R. and App.V.
This law seems rather similar to the law in Colorado that tripped up Joelle Riddle and Kathleen Curry, who filed suit against it after they were denied ballot access because they had declared themselves unaffiliated.
#2, freedom of association applies to groups, such as political parties. Unfortunately the freedom of association argument can’t be used to defend independent candidates because there is no group involved with an independent candidate. So, the legal argument that protects political parties’ freedom to decide for themselves whom to nominate does not help defeat the Colorado law on independent candidates. Remember that in 2010, a Colorado court upheld the right of the Constitution Party to choose Tom Tancredo, even though he had been a registered Republican until just before the Constitution Party nominated him.
365 days is 12 months, not 18 months.
You might remember the case where some voters changed their registration to Green Party and ran as Green Party candidates and the Green Party didn’t want them to run, and the Democratic Party was furnishing the lawyers for the Green Party.
So it is quite possible this is another provision put in by Democrats.
My post says 18 months before the election. That is what the bill provides. The bill provides a prior non-affiliation requirement of 12 months before candidates file, which is 18 months before the election.
All 40 Democratic amendments were rejected by the majority in the House. Democrats were not permitted to add any amendments to the Committee Substitute Bill itself, but had to make separate amendments.
Some century the MORON courts will detect that each election is NEW and has ZERO to do with ANY prior stuff – except perhaps the number of actual voters in the election area involved.
In the meantime – more and more EVIL laws and more court cases.
P.R. and App.V.
#5 You are correct, I had misread the bill as replacing a 6-month cutoff with a 12-month cutoff prior to the election.
#5 The introduced bill was 13 pages. The committee substitute did not “amend” the introduced bill, it replaced it.
Democrats would not have to make amendments to have provisions that they favored written into the committee substitute, so long as the Republicans were not opposed.
If the Republicans were opposed, then the Democrats would have had to make a formal amendment to the committee substitute. None of the amendments that the Democrats did offer had anything to do with candidate or party qualification. The closest that they came was by setting a March date for the presidential primary.
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