Ballot Access News

On December 4, the Tennessee Republican Party Executive Committee will vote on whether to endorse closed primaries for Tennessee.  See this story.  Thanks to Nancy Hanks for the link.  Presumably, if the party backs the idea, the party would try to obtain closed primaries by supporting a bill in the state legislature, rather than suing.  The Tennessee Republican Party has a majority in both houses of the legislature.

Tennessee has never had registration by party.  Most southern states have always had open primaries.

The Conservative Party, and the Christian Party, have both recently filed paperwork with the California Secretary of State, indicating that they intend to qualify for the California ballot.  In California, ever since 1950, all new parties that have qualified for the ballot have done so by persuading voters equal in number to 1% of the last gubernatorial vote to register into the party.  The Conservative Party, and also the Christian Party, will now receive a tally of how many voters register into those parties.  If either one persuades approximately 101,000 voters to become members, then they will become ballot-qualified parties.

In Nevada, the Tequila Party recently filed a copy of its bylaws and a list of its officers.  The idea of a Tequila Party was first mentioned a few weeks earlier by advocates for an easier path for illegal immigrants to become legal immigrants.  However, it is not clear that the people who organized the Tequila Party in Nevada have a political purpose.  The paperwork was filed by George Harris and Irma Aguirre, who own a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas.  The Tequila Party is now free to place candidates on the general election ballot for all offices except President, with a small number of signatures.  Each of the party’s nominees needs his or her own petition, but none of these petitions require more than 250 signatures.  See this story, which has a link to the Tequila Party’s bylaws, which were filed November 30.  Thanks to Glenn Brown for the link.

On December 2, a state court in Juneau, Alaska ruled that U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski is permitted to intervene in the lawsuit Miller v Lieutenant Governor, over the vote count for the U.S. Senate race.  She will argue that write-ins should count even when the voter forgets, or doesn’t know, to fill in the oval next to the name just written in.  She almost certainly doesn’t need such votes, but she will be the only one taking that stance.  Miller and the state agree that those kind of write-ins shouldn’t count.