On October 3, New Hampshire said the filing period for candidates running in the state’s presidential primaries will be between October 17 and October 28. Candidates get on the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries in New Hampshire by paying $1,000. No petition is needed. The date of the primary is still not set. Every other state that holds a presidential primary has now set its date. But New Hampshire won’t set its date until it knows the dates of the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada.
Why doesn’t New Hampshire have to preclear a change in date of its primary?
How about having the morons in IA and NV have their caucuse 1 day, week or month before the moron primary in NH ??? — a circular feedback loop — stuff like dividing by zero.
Where did *caucuse* come from — Latin, French ???
New Hampshire isn’t covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Will there be other political candidates besides Democrats and Republicans? I remember that the Libertarians one year were leading in the vote for a brief time.
New Hampshire won’t give a primary to any group unless it polled enough votes in the preceding election to meet the state’s definition of “party”. The only time in New Hampshire history that any party (other than Dem and Rep) ever got its own presidential primary was in 1992 and 1996, when the Libertarian Party had a New Hampshire presidential primary. In 1997 the legislature increased the vote test from 3% to 4% and ever since, no party has met the vote test.
The Constitution Party, the Reform Party, the Green Party, and the Natural Law Party, never ran anyone for either Governor or US Senator in New Hampshire, and those are the only two offices for which the vote test counts.
#3 Parts of New Hampshire are, just like parts of California are. California must pre-clear any statewide elections change.
California will have to seek pre-clearance to change the date of their presidential primary to June (or they may have already done so if the governor signed the legislation).
#6, you are right and I was wrong. New Hampshire does need to preclear the change in its presidential primary date. Thank you. I had never known that any part of New Hampshire is under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, so I thank Jim Riley for making me aware of that. It turns out that a few townships in New Hampshire are covered jurisdictions, so all new state election laws and practices must get cleared. But the Justice Department is capable of preclearing something very quickly.
#7 One argument against having New Hampshire going first is that it is not representative of the country, in particular it has very small minority population (2.8% Hispanic, 2.2% Asian, 1.1% Black).
Would the USDOJ consider the impact of the change in voting procedures in other States, or only on French speakers in New Hampshire?