Texas Representative Leo Berman, featured in the blog post just below this one, has kindly responded to my e-mail on Texas ballot access. He is chair of the House Elections Committee, and it would be very desirable for those of you who live in Texas to communicate with him. It is always wise to be not only courteous, but as friendly as one can be, while still disagreeing. His district phone number is 903-939-2400. His fax is 903-939-2402. His e-mail is district6.berman@house.state.tx.us. If we could change his opinion, we probably could get ballot access reform in 2009.
Berman’s response is, “Thanks for your advice. It seems strange to us Texans to get advice from a Californian, especially someone from San Francisco! We’ve done quite well without advice from the left coast.”
I responded, “Please don’t hold my residence against me! I have testified in court in Texas, including Pilcher v Rains, the case that ruled that Texas can’t require voter registration affidavit numbers on petitions. I have testified in the Texas legislature on ballot access. When candidates can’t get on the Texas November ballot, they file to be write-in candidates. Counting write-ins adds to the expense and headaches for election officials. Schmitz got 6,039 write-ins in Texas in 1972. Nader in 2004 got 9,153 write-ins in Texas. All those ballots had to be set aside by the vote-counting equipment, and looked at by a human being, which is costly. So I don’t agree that Texas is getting along OK. But thanks again for writing.”
Texans. Can’t stand’em.
Anyone who is childish enough to seriously use terms like “left coast” in correspondence doesn’t deserve to hold elective office.
Happens all the time. You should see the adolescent terminology State Senator Ken Cuccinelli and his ultra-conservative allies in the general assembly down in Virginia use.
Many write-in votes are electronically countable. In Harris County, the 3rd largest in the country, voters use a scroll wheel to select letters from an alphabet displayed on video screen to spell out a candidate’s name.
Election officials are not allowed to pre-program spellings in their software, so that if a voter spelled N-A-D-E-R they could get acknowledgement for a correct spelling. But they were permitted to program the counting software to count each recognized spelling among the votes.
So for example, they might find a vote for N-A-D-E-R, and if the election officials decided that was a vote for Ralph Nader, then all N-A-D-E-R votes would be counted. They would then have to review N-A-D-I-R and N-E-I-G-H-D-E-A-R and R-A-L-P-H- -N-A-D-E-R, but again these could be mass counted once accepted.
Last year, when the Texas House Elections Committee was holding hearings on moving the presidential primary from March to February, Rep. Berman remarked that if California had found a way to move their primary, that Texas ought to be able to find a way also (California had moved its presidential primary the previous week).
I sent him an e-mail, explaining that the way that California had done it was to split off their regular primary and hold it June; and just have a separate presidential primary in February.
Texas holds its regular primary and presidential primary at the same time. In 1979, there was a proposal to split the two so that voters could back John Connally’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination and also vote in the Democratic primary. This resulted in the infamous Killer Bee episode where some Democrat senators hid out to break quorum and prevent consideration of the primary-splitting legislation (there were very few GOP senators at that time so it was actually an interparty dispute).
As presidential primaries have moved earlier and earlier, the Texas primary has been dragged along behind. This has resulted in a number of problems. The filing period for re-election begins less than halfway through a 2-year term.
In the case of congressional elections it is contrary to the spirit that the voters choose their representative at a date in November, when the choice is effectively made 9 months earlier by different voters, due to deaths, people coming of age, naturalizations, people moving, etc.; and that the residency qualification is based on the November date. If you wanted to keep new citizens, younger voters, new residents from choosing their representative an extremely early primary is one tactic for doing so. If you really didn’t want people who had only lived in the State for two weeks from being elected to Congress, you would require them to file a year earlier.
It may make a candidate prematurely commit to filing for re-election, which in turn can discourage challengers. In 2007, the Harris County Judge resigned just a couple of months into his term after being re-elected to take a job in private industry. He had been considering the offer for some time, but because he had to file for re-election so far in advance (15 months earlier) he had to commit to the election. This undoubtedly led to blocking any candidates from the GOP running, and may have discouraged more electable Democrats. In addition, a vacancy in the nomination could not have been filled unless it was due to death or serious illness, or disqualification, such as for moving from the county.
The city of Houston holds its elections in November of the odd year. Moving the State primary to February would have meant requiring a candidate to file for the next election before he had lost the previous one (as Chris Bell had done in 2001 and 2002)
I suggested as a solution to Rep. Berman that the State primary be moved to May (when Texas has an election day) or September, and deregulate the presidential primary
His response basically suggested that he appreciated my concerns about the “unusual circumstance in Houston” which I sort of took as implying that I might as well been in California.
Rep. Berman favors party registration, so if he pushes for election law changes, it will simply mean that Green, Constitution, etc. parties would have to convince 1% of registered voters register with them and to do so before the convention/primary season. It would likely mean that only non-affiliated registrants could sign the petition of an independent candidate.
The only state that ever had a law making it illegal for registered party members to sign a petition for an independent candidate was Arizona. That law passed in 1993 and was declared unconstitutional in federal court in 1999. So I don’t think Texas could do that, even if Texas puts in registration by party.
Gee – the EVIL bastard BARBARIAN gerrymander party hacks who started the Civil WAR in 1861 linger on and on in EVIL Texas ???
Rather amazing — a mere 143 years after the end of the Civil WAR in 1865 — with some attempt to bring civilization to the EVIL rotted ex-slave States with their EVIL party hack *politics*.
Re: #6 In ‘American Party of Texas v. White’, the US Supreme Court specifically upheld the Texas statute that restricted primary voters from signing petitions of independent candidates.
Primary voters may actually form a tighter bond with the party than mere party registrants, since they overtly participate in party activities, while a party registrant may have absent-mindedly checked a box when filling out a voter registration form (eg Independent Party in Florida, Mayor Newsome’s fiancee)