Two bills pending in the Illinois House would injure minor parties and/or independent candidates. HB 5263 makes it more difficult for ballot-qualified parties to nominate candidates. It must pass the House Elections & Campaign Reform Committee by May 22, or it will die. That committee did hold a hearing on the bill last week. Witnesses from the Green Party believe they at least persuaded the committee to amend the bill, so it does less damage. Currently, ballot-qualified parties are permitted to nominate by party meeting, if the March primary resulted in no nominee. The bill would force candidates nominated by party meeting to submit a petition.
HB 2673, which would restore the straight-ticket device to Illinois ballots, must pass the House Committee by May 23. Illinois used the straight-ticket device until 1997. A straight-ticket device makes it possible for the voter to vote on all partisan races without even looking to see who is running for each office.
How much $$$ to do a PROPER ballot access case about SEPARATE – IS – NOT – EQUAL ???
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).
I.E. to have 1 or more EQUAL tests for ALL candidates for the SAME office in the SAME area to get on the ballots ???
I.E. An EQUAL nominating petition to show preliminary support from the Electors.
This AIN’T atomic physics.
HB 5263 passed the House at the beginning of April. It has been bottled up in a Senate committee since then.
It would simply require that “ballot-qualified” parties choose their nominees by a balloting of voters who choose the party’s primary ballot.
Perhaps the primary ballot could also include the following choices:
[] The _________________ Party should make no nomination for the office of ______________/
[] The nomination of the _______________ Party
for the office of ______________ should be made
by the party bosses.
These would be in addition to regular candidates (if any). So if you didn’t like those running, you could simply decide it better for your party not to have a nominee, or to let the party bosses choose the candidate for the party.
Votes for the “party bosses” option could be considered proxies given to the elected precinct chairman. If there is no elected precinct chairman, they would be void.
I think all partisan candidates should be selected at party meetings. They should be chosen by the individuals who are actually active in the political party that the candidates wish to run for office for. If an individual is not interested in dealing with a political party, then they should run as an independent.
These government mandated primaries are a sham and should not exist. It is a direct assault on the right of citizens to organize themselves politically.
As usual – nominations of PUBLIC officers is PUBLIC business — and NOT party hack business by party hacks — i.e. subgroups of ALL PUBLIC Electors.
Before OFFICIAL primaries came along about 1890 there was TOTAL party hack boss corruption.
How goes top 2 primary nominations in WA State — Enough party hacks running ???
There is nothing that prevents voters meeting and deciding to back a particular candidate for office. Why do you have to have recognition by the state that you are a “party”? Decide which candidate you are going to back, and print a bunch of posters that say that John Doe is the nominee of your Cognoscenti Party.
#5 — perhaps in a mini-township with about 100 or less Electors.
This is the New Age of petitions in areas with LOTS of Electors — candidate nominating petitions, constitutional amendment petitions, law petitions, referendum petitions and recall petitions.
See the ratios of Voters/Seats for each house of the Congress and each State legislature.
About 130,000,000 voters in Nov. 2008 in the U.S.A. ???
#6 Of course after the members of the Cognoscenti Party chose their candidates they would have to gather petition signatures from the electorate. Since the Cognoscenti Party was a very select group, they would to gather the signatures from the non-Congnoscenti.