On April 14, the Louisiana House passed HB 292 by a vote of 72-26. It changes Congressional elections from a semi-closed primary system to a system in which parties don’t have nominees. All candidates would run on a single ballot in November. If anyone polled at least 50%, that person would be elected. Otherwise there would be a run-off in December. Louisiana used this system 1998 through 2006 for Congress. See this story.
The vote by party was:
R 41 Yeas; 6 Nays; 3 Absent.
D 28 Yeas; 20 Nays; 2 Absent.
I 2 Yeas; 1 Nay; 0 Absent.
2 vacancies.
The recorded vote on the legislature web site was 71:27, rather than the 72:26 in the article.
All candidates would run on a single ballot in November. If anyone polled at least 50%, that person would be elected?
Yep – same system that’s used for statewide and local elections in Louisiana.
In Louisiana, all state elections are in odd years.
The Dec stuff is blatantly UN-constitutional.
——-
2 U.S. Code, Sec. 7.
The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even
numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of
the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and
Delegates to the Congress commencing on the 3d day of January next
thereafter.
(R.S. Sec. 25; Mar. 3, 1875, ch. 130, Sec. 6, 18 Stat. 400; June 5,
1934, ch. 390, Sec. 2, 48 Stat. 879.)
Codification
R.S. Sec. 25 derived from act Feb. 2, 1872, ch. 11, Sec. 3, 17 Stat.
28.
The second sentence of this section, which was based on section 6 of
the act Mar. 3, 1875 and made this section inapplicable to any State
that had not yet changed its day of election and whose constitution
required an amendment to change the day of election of its State
officers, was omitted.
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THE day , THE election — much too difficult for THE LA party hack MORONS to understand ???
One more brain dead case for the SCOTUS folks ???
The Louisiana system now used for state and local elections is an extension of the old one-party (truly NO-PARTY) system, in which elections were decided in the Democratic primary, with a Democratic runoff if necessary.
Once the Republicans began running a few candidates in the 1960s, a Democratic nominee began usually having to run three campaigns– the Democratic primary, the Dem runoff, and the general election. A Republican candidate, in contrast, usually only had to run in the general election, since Republicans almost never had primary opposition.
The Democrats naturally resented this situation, and they wanted to (1) force Republicans to run in the same election with the Democrats, and (2) return Louisiana’s elections to the two-step process that everyone had been accustomed to.
Louisianans would thus consider it crazy to have a runoff after one candidate has already gotten 50%-plus of the vote.
Louisiana’s next state elections will be in 2011, as will Mississippi’s and Kentucky’s.
I always enjoyed this system.
#5 Demo Rep, the provision you are looking for is
2 U.S.C. § 8
When Congress set the uniform election/appointment date for presidential electors in 1845, there was debate whether an exception should be made for states where the electors were appointed by the legislature, which at that time was South Carolina. All other states used popular election to appoint their electors. When an election is used to appoint electors, the appointment is deemed to have occurred on the election date, even though it may not have been ascertained who the electorate had appointed.
Before 1845, the time for appointing electors was about a 5-week period before the day that electors met in each state, which was in early December.
States that used elections held them during a short period toward the beginning of the period. This gave time for the local election results to be dispatched to the state capital, the winning electors determined, notice of their appointment sent to the electors, and time for them to travel to the meeting place in their state. When communication was by horseback, this could take most of a month.
But in South Carolina, the legislature could make the appointments at the end of the month, which happened to coincide with the opening of their regular session. If they were forced to make their appointment on the 1st Tuesday after the 1st Monday in November, they would have to meet in special session every 4 years ago.
During the debate, it was pointed out that an exception had already been made for states that required a majority for electors to be appointed, and so it seemed reasonable to some at least that an exception be made when the legislature made the appointments. After all, the concern about popular elections was the practice of “pipelining” where voters might move across state lines to vote a second time, plus results in one state might influence them in others.
Ultimately, no exception was made for South Carolina, but the exception for majority elections remained. It was used in Massachusetts in 1848 and Georgia in 1860 (in both cases, the electors were chosen by the legislature – no popular election was used).
It remains in 3 U.S.C. § 2. While a modern reading might lead one to conclude that this was to handle contingencies like Florida in 2000, it was originally meant to handle cases where the “failure to choose” was because the method of choosing the electors directed by the legislature required a majority popular vote.
The uniform congressional election date (for representatives, since this was before the 17th Amendment) was set in 1872 (it is included in the first reapportionment bill for that year). Like the law for appointment of presidential electors, it included an exception for cases where a majority was required. Of course, unlike for presidential electors, representatives must be elected by popular vote.
The 1872 law was later relaxed, grandfathering existing dates. It was not until 1960 that all states held their congressional elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November when Maine fell in line.
But the exception for failure to elect remains in 2 U.S.C. § 8 (a). Again, it might seem like the section is about vacancies due to death, resignation, etc., but it is also to handle cases where a state requires a majority for election. While it is now conventional for this to be in the form of a runoff between the top 2 candidates, historically it was not unusual simply to hold an entirely new election. In some cases, states had 8 or 9 “trials” as they kept trying to elect a candidate with a majority. There is at least one instance where a district went unrepresented for an entire congressional term.