On May 13, Illinois HB 723 was amended in the Senate Elections Committee, the very day it had been assigned to that committee. This indicates the legislative leadership is interested in passing it quickly. It restricts the ability of ballot-qualified parties to nominate someone after the primary is over. Existing law lets the party do this with no additional petition, but the bill requires that candidates nominated after the primary must submit a petition, to be circulated between mid-February and mid-April. The amendment reduces that petition from 5% of the last vote cast, to approximately one-half of 1% of the last vote cast.
A political party is composed of the voters in its primary.
In Illinois, a party is not so much “ballot-qualified” as it is “primary-qualified”. Even when nomination vacancies are filled, it is done by committeemen whose vote is weighted by the votes cast for their party in the primary.
The new procedure simply requires that a candidate get the same number of signatures on his petition that he would have needed if he had just filed for the primary in the first place.
HB 723 had already been approved by the Senate Elections committee. Illinois has the procedure of referring substantive floor amendments to subject committees. Given that a subject committee may act on floor amendments on one-hour notice, I suspect that it is not unusual at all for a subject committee to approve floor amendments on a very short turn around, especially when the end of session is looming (May 30) and the House will have to concur with the amendment.
This bill is very clever. It is intended to thwart the efforts of any smaller party that might become ballot qualified in Illinois.
By setting up barriers now, in advance of any 3rd party or new party gaining ballot status, they hope to make it hard for such a party to make any use of its status.
The forces of evil are working hard in the US today:
* top-two election system to kill 3rd parties in western states
* efforts to ban paid petitioners
* the NPV plan which will turn the Presidency over to mob rule while the other ballot laws keep all but the duopoly approved candidates off the ballot.
* and a myriad of other sneaky bad changes being reported here.
Thanks to NPV which will guarantee the rule of the f a s c i s t – s o c i a l i s t duopoly and make change impossible, and the coming crash of the dollar due to the Federal Reserve and the now total real debt of the US of over $71 trillion, it just might be time to emigrate to a new land of opportunity.
Yes, thanks to the advocacy of the Illinois Green Party, the signature requirement for slated candidates now matches those of pre-primary established party candidates, and the timeframe for collecting signatures is now slightly longer.
However, this bill still renders most slating impossible. The petitioning period is only 75 days, as opposed to the standard 90 days. Not only that, the slating committee cannot even meet to choose a candidate until one month after the election. In other words, a candidate only has 45 days where they can actually circulate a petition.
Since the slating committee itself is elected at the primary, how could it meet much earlier than a month after the primary?
> Since the slating committee itself is elected at
> the primary, how could it meet much earlier than > a month after the primary?
It can’t, by law, and that’s kind of my point. So the 75 day deadline does not mean that candidates have 75 days to collect signatures. They only have 45.