Interesting Virginia Election Law Bills

The 2020 session of the Virginia legislature has many election law bills. Below are some of them, but this is far from an exhaustive list.

SB 174 would have provided that each U.S. House district elect its own presidential elector. This is the system now used by Maine and Nebraska. That bill was defeated in the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee on January 14, by a vote of 12-3. The other bills mentioned in this post, below, have not yet had any action.

HB 177 is the National Popular Vote Plan bill.

HB 214 would legalize out-of-state petition circulators, to conform the law to the 2013 decision Libertarian Party of Virginia v Judd.

Two bills would provide for partisan labels for local office. Currently many local elections are partisan, but party labels aren’t on the ballot. These bills are HB 216 and SB 131.

HB 218 would delete the authority of a qualified party to nominate any candidates for statewide state office by convention, and require primaries for those offices instead. The three offices affected by this bill are Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General.

HB 1103 would let any city or county use ranked choice voting for its own officers.

SB 126 would delete the law that lets incumbents dictate to their party whether the party should use a primary or a convention in their particular election. That law was declared unconstitutional in 2019 in Sixth Congressional District Republican Party v Alcorn.


Comments

Interesting Virginia Election Law Bills — 1 Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.