On May 5, the South Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee passed H3067, which ends the ability of two political parties to jointly nominate the same candidate. This bill has passed the House over a year ago, on March 3, 2009, but had been dormant since then, until May 5, 2010. The Committee also amended the bill to make it effective in 2011, so even if it passed the Senate, it must return to the House for concurrence in the amendment.
A parallel bill in the Senate, S334, has not made any headway.
Because the committee vote was not unanimous, the bill is not likely to advance further. The session will probably end in two or three weeks. Senator Brad Hutto, a Democrat, opposed it.
The three members of the committee are Campsen (ch), Cleary, and Scott. I can’t find any indication or explanation of how they voted.
Campsen and Cleary are Republicans from Charleston and Georgetown, respectively. Scott is a Columbia Democrat.
I don’t know which of them filed the minority report, but because there are only 3 members (as you note), one of them did, so the vote must have been 2-1. I hope you can find out which one filed the minority report.
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South Carolina does not permit joint nomination. It permits nominations to be made severally by political parties.
The House version had added a provision eliminating straight-ticket voting, and when it passed the House it was very much a party line vote, with Republicans favoring, and Democrats opposed.
The subcommittee removed the straight ticket language, so now it simply limits a candidate to one party nomination.
The version that passed the House had specified that the law would come into effect whenever the governor signed it. The primary is June 8, so there is no way that it could take effect this year. So the January 1st, 2011 effective date should really be considered a technical change. The significant change is the removal of the straight-ticket language which will grease the skids for approval by the legislature this year.
Since Eugene Platt sued the Democrats, it is likely that there will be at least some Democratic support for the simple bill.
The full judiciary committee meets early next week. They can approve the bill, and have it passed out of the full senate by the end of the week. The House will concur in the senate amendments, and the governor can sign the bill.
Another impetus for moving on the bill is the nonsensical ruling by the federal court last year.
The court ruled that because the State Elections Commission had ignored a straightforward reading of the law several years after it was passed, that in 2008 when they started following the law as written, that was a “change” in voting procedure and should have been precleared under the VRA.
Since the actual law has not been changed, South Carolina might have difficulty in getting DOJ approval to “change” to actually following the law.
It is also possible that there have been candidate filings for this year’s election that reminded legislators about what had happened in 2008.