A Maine volunteer for a gubernatorial candidate in 2010 has pleaded guilty to listing several small donors as having contributed to the campaign, even though they had not. The Maine public funding programs requires candidates to collect a certain number of $5 contributions, as a condition of getting public funding. This sets up a temptation for candidates to try to claim that they have collected more donations than they really have. See this story.
Wisconsin’s Treasurer says he has drafted a proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate State Treasurer, and Secretary of State, as elected positions. Currently both of these offices are elected in midterm years in partisan elections. If this proposal passed, it would be somewhat more difficult for minor parties to retain their spot on the ballot. The law requires them to poll 1% for any statewide office in midterm years. See this story.
The Tennessee House State and Local Government Subcommittee will hear HB 794 on Wednesday, March 30. This is the bill that makes minor improvements in the ballot access law for minor parties. The existing law was struck down in federal court last year. The bill moves the petition deadline from March to early April, and removes the petition wording that implies signers are members. But the improvement in the deadline does not go far enough. The court decision last year said a deadline four months before the primary is too early, and the Tennessee non-presidential primary is in August.
When an identical bill, SB 935, was heard in the Senate State and Local Government Committee, that committee passed the bill unanimously. No one testified that the bill didn’t make enough improvement. One Libertarian was in the audience for the hearing, but he hadn’t arrived in time to sign up to testify. However, it is likely that several minor party activists will testify in the House Committee. The bill makes no change in the number of signatures, which for 2012 is 40,042 (2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote). No party has qualified by petition in Tennessee since 1968. That history is one reason the law was declared unconstitutional last year.
SB 935 was to have been voted on in the Tennessee Senate on consent on March 21, but then the bill was taken off the consent calendar and set for March 24. But it has now been postponed again, to March 31. This probably indicates that some Senators realize the bill is inadequate.
On March 24, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins granted the Libertarian Party’s request for a 3-judge court in Libertarian National Committee v Federal Election Commission. This is the case which challenges the McCain-Feingold limit on individuals giving more than $30,800 to a national committee of a political party, in the special context of bequests from deceased donors.
The McCain-Feingold law provides that constitutional challenges to any part of the law should be handled by a 3-judge court, unless the original judge who gets the case thinks it is utterly without merit. The case arose when Tennessee resident Raymond Burrington died in 2007, leaving $217,734 to the Libertarian National Committee. The law won’t permit the party to receive this money now. Instead the law and regulations require that the money sit in a bank account, and the party can only withdraw $30,800 per year from the account. Before the McCain-Feingold law passed, it was legal for any individual to give an unlimited amount of money to a national committee of a political party.
On March 23, the Hawaii House Judiciary killed SB 1187, which would have provided for an elected Attorney General. The Senate had passed the bill on March 8, 16-9. Hawaii is one of seven states in which the voters do not elect the Attorney General.
According to this story, a bill will probably be introduced on Friday, March 25, setting up a system in which voters register into political parties. The legislators who are drafting this bill probably are unaware that several courts have ruled that voters must be permitted to register into an unqualified party. The story mentions that voters will be allowed to register into the Libertarian and Constitution Parties (which are both ballot-qualified). This implies that voters won’t be able to register into unqualified parties, such as the Green Party.
The Second Circuit and the Tenth Circuit have both ruled that voters must be allowed to register into active unqualified parties. Similar decisions have been made by a U.S. District Court in Iowa, and by New Jersey state courts.