On March 17, the Illinois House Election & Campaign Reform Committee passed HB 2009 unanimously. It says that anyone who ran in a primary, but who is not nominated, is then barred from running in the same election year as an independent nominee, or the nominee of another party, for any office. The bill also pertains to people who win their primary but then withdraw as the nominee of the party whose primary they had won.
This bill would have barred Scott Lee Cohen from running as an independent candidate in 2010 for Governor. He had won the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor in February 2010, but then had resigned that nomination. Then he had become an independent candidate for Governor and had polled 135,705 votes (3.64% of the total vote cast) in November. The bill would also have blocked John B. Anderson from running for President as an independent in 1980 in his own state, Illinois. He had filed to run in the March 1980 Illinois presidential primary, and in April 1980 he had withdrawn from the Republican contest and declared as an independent. He got on the ballot in November 1980 in all 50 states.
However, the bill liberalizes who can run in a partisan primary. Current law seems to bar anyone from running in a presidential primary if he or she voted in the primary of another party in the preceding year, or ran in the primary of another party in the preceding year. But HB 2009 deletes those restrictions.
The end result of bills like this is to decrease the (already low) electoral chances of moderates, in exchange for making it harder for independent “spoiler” candidates to run.
In other words, another mad hack on a broken system that needs a spoiler-free and consensus-seeking election method, such as approval voting or score voting.
Current law does not actually impose the limit that this bill would seemingly do away with; the State Supreme Court has recently clarified it.
This is simply a bad bill, more of what we’ve come to expect out of Springfield.
I think you are making some assumptions with regard to the presidency that might or might not be valid. Presidential primary candidates don’t have to file, and delegate candidates file separately.
Otherwise, the law is similar to Texas, in that filing for office or voting in a primary is an affiliating act, but prior year activities are not.
A more interesting application than Cohen, would be when Adlai Stevenson IV(?) was nominated for governor as a Democrat, but ran as a 3rd party candidate.
#3, that’s an excellent point about Adlai Stevenson! Thank you.