On February 21, the California Senate Elections Committee passed AB 1200, a bill to revise the California law on how parties elect county central committees. California has five ballot-qualified parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties. The Libertarian Party, and Americans Elect, have chosen not to have party officers elected in public primary elections. However, the American Independent, Green, and Peace & Freedom Parties do prefer to have party officials chosen at their own primary elections.
The Elections Committee passed the bill, but first amended it to reflect the desires of the three minor parties that had concerns. The American Independent Party state chair, Mark Seidenberg, testified in favor of one amendment, and his wishes were respected. Peace & Freedom Party leaders also attended the hearing and the Committee amended the bill in accordance with their testimony. The Green Party did not send a representative, but had communicated with the committee.
The amendment concerning the American Independent Party acknowledges that elected members of the party’s county central committees may choose whether to be sworn in either by government officials, or by county chairs of the party. If the bill had not been amended, the committee members would have been sworn in only by county chairs of the party (or the designee of a county chair).
The amendment desired by the Peace & Freedom Party, and the Green Party, preserves the ability of people to be write-in candidates for County Central Committee. The original bill would have eliminated the write-in option except in cases when more people had filed to be on the ballot for a particular county central committee race than there are vacancies. The reason write-ins are important in County Central Committee races is that existing law won’t permit certain people to appear on the primary ballot if they had been members of another party during the preceding period, but such people can be write-in candidates.
REMOVE ALL robot party hack stuff from ALL State Constitutions and laws — the sooner the better.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
This should be mandatory reading for all those legislators in Washington state fully in the major party grip while considering that awful work product E3SHB 1860.
#2 You don’t want the dreck that California has placed in Division 7 of its Election Code. Do you really want statutes that specify how each individual party chooses its presidendial electors; or specifies that the Whirled Peas Party in Tumwater County should elect its party officials in a slightly different manner. Except it won’t refer to Tumwater County by name but will refer to Class 9 counties, which turns out to be made up of all counties that rank 9th in population (California has 58 counties, and 58 “classes” of counties). California didn’t want to specify that it had singled out the county, so pretends that it is some characteristic shared by all counties whose population was 114,386 persons.
Read the Washington Constitution, and see what it actually says about electing the legislature, and then look at all the language about filling vacancies, and how often it has been amended.
Washington Constitution should simply provide that the legislature shall provide for the filling of vacancies; or better yet go back to the original constitution, and have the governor call an election. It works for congressional vacancies. All Washington elections are by mail, so there are no polling places and special elections should be relatively easy to administer.
California should define a political party as being a group of (100 or more) registered voters with the same party preference.
In the future, new parties would only be recognized on the basis of a petition signed by 100 or more voters that they are forming the party and changing their party preference.
If a voter attempt to name a non-party on a registration application, the registrar would contact him and explain that his party preference is non-partisan and how to change it if he doesn’t like that.
Political parties would be designated major, minor, and unorganized. Major parties would be classified based on their share of total registration (say 1/10 of 1%), and would be entitled to a presidential preference primary, the authority to nominate a presidential candidate, to endorse candidates on the sample ballot, and to have a role in naming of election judges.
Minor parties could have a presidential nominee, but would have to qualify by petition (in effect it would be similar to qualifying an independent presidential candidate, but the party would be authorizing use of their party name in association with the candidacy).
A candidate for a voter-nominated office could have his preference for a minor or major party shown on the ballot. This would ensure voters that the party is an actual political party.
Voters registered with an unorganized party could petition to hold a state organizing convention (say 1% of party registrants or 10 registrants, whichever is greater). Thus parties whose organized status had lapsed could reorganize so long as the number of party registrants remained above 100.
An organized party would have to comply with the following:
(1) State executive committee with, with at least a chair, vice chair, secretary, and treasurer, and procedures for their election and replacement;
(2) Biennial state convention;
(3) Rules providing an effective role in party governance for all voters who have registered a preference for a party, on a non-discriminatory basis and without requiring payment of a fee. Parties may provide for a minimal durational registration period prior to participating in party affairs as a member (not to exceed 6 months) or to be a party officer (not to exceed 12 months).
(4) Rules providing designation of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, presidential elector candidates, and procedures for making sample ballot endorsements in each county.
Elections of party officials will be by-mail only ballot, with the State conducting the election on behalf of the parties. If a party prefers, it may elect by convention, in which case the State will send an invitation on behalf of the party to conventions which are open to all party registrants.
Transition: County election officials will examine all original affidavits of voter registration to ensure that voters are correctly classified. All registrations that have been assigned either as no party preference, or a preference for an other (non-qualified) party will be aggregated by the actual voter designation, and the SOS will propose disposition (eg “Ind.”, “Independent”, “None”, and “nonpartisan” might be proposed to being classified as No Preference). Spelling variants might similarly be proposed for aggregation. After a comment period, the SOS will inform the registrants of the classification of their registrations. As a result of this process, unorganized parties (more than 100 registrants) may be discovered, which could be organized. Registrations numbering less than 100 would be proposed for abandonment and the voter registration changed to nonpartisan.
#3,4 your posts are to be appreciated. No, I do not ideally want parties regulated differently in different places, but even you describe an ideal where they’re regulated. The way Washington fills legislative vacancies is bad and that because these legislators like the local major party crowd solution. Yes, much good could be done in reforming the politics of the state by having its constitution changed. I’m all for a con con. Too bad WA isn’t more like FL in that regard in having a Constitutional Revision Commission at work every 20 years. Too bad Washingtonians can’t change their constitution via initiative like at least two other states can. Put me down for all that but mostly put me down for having a problem with major parties and the fact that not enough other people, voters have a problem with that makes me have an even larger problem with that.
You doubtlessly know there’s nothing especially constitutional about having two major parties exist as the singular most important fact about politics in the U.S. but that the deal.
Every single time a voter can find the opportunity to kick the two party system in the genitals it should sieze that opportunity because or politics is so stale and rancid and dominated by stuff we all know is unworthy it is all ways fair to give the two party system a bad time. Our political system needs more candidates, more voters, more parties, more winners, more discussion, more attention, more actual representation. It needs less less money, less electoral predictability even stability maybe. That might mean a somewhat more complex electoral arrangement but one that is less dense (understood only by pros).
Our same-two-perpetual-major-parties system is a single duopoly. A guaranteed franchise for half of all the time in power and the other half waiting for the rival party to soil themselves gauranteeing the return to power as a mandate for governance that’s the big lie.
What’s wrong is that voters never get to express themselves. The dial only has two settings, A and B. Our system must change so a party can die like the Whigs once did. We need choices, even electorally rejected parties should get a few seats.
This country really needs a constitutional amendment giving primacy in our system to the political minorities as the nearly the most virtuous thing there is. Really, what a good political system is, is a grand regulated coalition of political minorities, governing as-if anyone gave it a lot of thought-the fantasy of a political majority is rejected as unpopular politics, there really is no such thing as a “majority party” because everyone would want to be a part of that and many would mistate their politics to be a part of it and so many do today. Rival pretend majorities require much lying and that inhibits listening, promotes nausea, etc. All real people are political minorities, all of them, the reconciliation should recognize that. The major party system marginalizes unless the effort is so large and so fierce that something gives. We need something way more user friendly.
Kick the two party system in. . ..
#5 Think about this. Washington was able to change its whole system of electing its partisan officials by initiative **statute** because the constitution does not specify the detail of how an election occurs.
Washington (not even the legislature) can not eliminate PCOs because the constitution says so much in detail about vacancies.
If you look at the history of Article II, Section 15 it started out very simple. The governor shall call a special election. In 1930, perhaps as a cost cutting measure, election was eliminated and county commissioners were permitted to fill vacancies. In 1956 some commissioners must have chosen a replacement of the wrong party, so they had to add some more language and pretend that the commissioners were making the appointment. And now it has undergone two more sets of changes. They didn’t start out to protect the two major parties, they just blundered into it.
Washington’s election statutes are ever-vulnerable to judicial review. A more constitutional arrangement would be more purposeful, probably more integral, more resistant to judicial redress.
WA Sec of State office (I’ll assume he gets legal advice)was prepping to eliminate the PCO from the ballot (major parties united against that)and that is a defensible action in court if only for the contortions required attempting to dodge obvious associational problems that really still exist in fact (HB 1860 allows one to just declare for the moment that they’re voting for an R or a D which is not functionally disimilar from old blanket primary logic though now it is reduced to only one office, a partisan office to which it would be key to prevent rival partisans, minor partisans from participating) if not found ultimately to exist in law on the ballot.
Everything is so snarled that I’m perfectly willing to watch a crisis develop over how PCO’s must be chosen in the unlikely but fortunate event that the major parties must have their own apparatus for selecting PCO’s (many precincts have none)and those people get to participate in the selection of candidates for the county council pick for a legislative vacancy as opposed to PCO’s selected by public ballot.
That scenerio is preferable to acedeing to the precedent of prior blunders into one of the many examples of major party dominance.
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#7 Intricate procedures written into a state constitution are no more protected from judicial review than statutory provisions.
Sam Reed was told by a federal district judge that he could not administer PCO elections in the manner provided for in Washington statute. He can encourage the legislature to make changes to the law as he has with HB 1860, or to avoid conducting the elections.
Getting the law changed is safer.
You’re assuming that the members of the legislature are gung ho about partisan elections. They’ll put on the uniform if it helps to get them elected, but but they will resist being the puppets of the party chieftans.
Back in 2004 after the blanket primary was ruled unconstitutional, the legislature passed a Top 2 Open Primary.
Gary Locke got bad advice and vetoed it. In his veto message he said that he regretted that the state political parties had challenged the blanket primary in court. It was only after the veto that the Grange started their initiative drive.
Because the political parties are still appealing the Top 2 Primary, they can probably put enough pressure on legislators to not really reform the system. And I really think that HB 1860 is just a stop gap because the presidential primary was eliminated. It started out looking like the procedure used in the presidential primary, and ended up looking more like the pick-a-party primary for one office. There would have been push back from election administers and many legislators, to get to the final version, which was enough to get the political parties off their backs.
I appreciate the fresh narrative, it’s a little more detailed and realpolitic than my own.
Getting the law (PCO, partisan)changed is safer. For whom? For what? Is my premise that whatever the major parties want is anti-voter, is that off the reality spectrum? Maybe this safety you refer to has to do with legal advise given to one of these big players and some kind of fiduciary responsibility that is had to insure no big can of worms is to be opened up unecesarily because of some formal exposure to something akin to malfeasance or whatnot.
The voters would actually benefit from a spectacular collapse of any kind on this electoral/partisan front.
When the major parties act in a united fashion, they’re always wrong, that is the guide post.
I’ll savor this though: “. . . .they (members of the legislature)will resist being the puppets of the party chieftans” We are talking about the regulation of partisan electoral politics here? If there’s any news on this front, I wanna know, betcha they’re retiring.
Your report is worthy and basically nuetral.
Perhaps “safer” is not the correct term. “prudemt” maybe. It is better to be operating under statute, than an invalid statute and a court order.
The representative and senators don’t choose the state party chair, and the state party chair doesn’t choose the representatives and senators. They may cooperate when it is to their advantage.
The court case is still going on. One of the arguments the parties make is that the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Party was not elected, because the voters voted for someone else. Do you think that person who was elected, wants to switch back to partisan primaries?