On February 6, the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee passed SCR 1021 by a vote of 6-2. If the legislature passes the bill, then the voters will be asked in November 2012 whether they wish to cut off funds for the state’s program for public funding for candidates for state office.
On February 7, a Kentucky lower state court judge invalidated the state’s new legislative district boundaries. See this story. Filing for the primary will be postponed. Although Kentucky elects its statewide state executive officers in odd years, it elects its legislators in even years, including this year.
On February 7, a subcommittee of the Virginia House Privileges and Elections Committee unanimously passed HB 1151. It says that petitions for U.S. Senate and U.S. House may circulate using the old U.S. House districts, if the new districts aren’t settled by January 1 of the election year. The bill has an urgency clause so it can go into effect immediately on being signed. It covers primary petitions and general election petitions.
U.S. Senate petitions are affected because Virginia requires 400 signatures from each U.S. House district on any statewide petition.
The bill ought to include the same solution for presidential petitions, but it doesn’t. No one in the Virginia legislature seems to know or care that minor party and independent candidates for President are unable to circulate now, because the petitions must include one candidate for presidential elector from each U.S. House district. Also presidential petitions have the same 400-signature requirement from each district. It would be eminently sensible to expand HB 1151 to cover presidential petitions, but that idea has been suggested to the sponsor and he has declined to amend his bill to fix the presidential petition problem. Virginia activists ought to be publicizing this problem. Virginia law lets presidential petitions include a stand-in presidential candidate, and says presidential petitions may state to circulate on January 1. Clearly, the intent of the law is to permit presidential petitioning right now, yet in reality such petitioning is impossible because of the U.S. House district boundary problem.
Here is the 32-page rebuttal brief of the Ohio legislature, in Libertarian Party of Ohio v Husted, 11-4066, now pending in the 6th circuit. The Ohio legislature is trying to persuade the 6th circuit that U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley’s September 7, 2011 order was improper. That order put the Libertarian Party on the ballot in Ohio for the 2012 election.
The Ohio legislature’s rebuttal brief is mostly about procedural issues, and only a small part of the brief attempts to defend the existing Ohio ballot access law, which has a petition deadline for new and minor parties of November of the year before the election. That is the same deadline that was held unconstitutional in 2006 in the 6th circuit. Although the legislature passed a bill in 2011 to change the petition deadline from four months before the primary to three months before the primary, that bill is not in effect because it is subject to a referendum petition.
On February 7, the Virginia House passed HB 1133, the bill that removes the in-district residency requirement for petitioners. The vote was 80-18. If this bill passes the Senate and is signed into law, it would moot the pending Lux lawsuit. However, Virginia would continue to ban out-of-state circulators.
Jim Jenkins, a prominent Nebraska rancher and a former Democrat, has been mulling over running for U.S. Senate this year as an independent candidate. However, in 2011 the Nebraska legislature passed a law, saying no one may be an independent candidate (except for President) if the person was a registered member of a qualified political party at any time during the election year. Jenkins didn’t switch his registration from “Democrat” to “independent” until January, so the new law won’t permit him to be an independent candidate.
He still has two options: (1) he is free to switch back to the Democratic Party and run in the Democratic primary; (2) he is free to start a new political party and be that party’s nominee for U.S. Senate. See this article about him. The deadline for a new political party petition is August 1, and that petition needs 4,880 signatures.
A bill is pending in the legislature to repeal the prior disaffiliation law for independent candidates. It is LB 1070, but it is unlikely to pass in time to help Jenkins.