Now is the time for anyone who is unhappy with his or her state’s election laws to ask a state legislator, or a legislator-elect, to introduce bills in the 2013 sessions of that state’s legislature.
Deadline vary tremendously, but some states have very early deadlines for legislators to introduce bills. Indiana requires bills in the 2013 session to have been introduced by late 2012.
As far as is known, activists in the following states are already working on getting ballot access bills introduced: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Georgia Libertarians ought to be seeking a change in the law, to enable the party to run candidates for U.S. House, legislature, and county partisan office. The Georgia law, making it virtually impossible for the Libertarian Party to run for these offices, is absurd, when one considers that statewide Libertarian nominees in partisan elections carried counties in both 2008 and 2012, and polled over one-third of the vote in one statewide partisan race last week.
Who is working on this in Illinois?
Christina Tobin.
What kind of changes is Christina Tobin working on making in Illinois ballot access laws?
#3, last year she got a bill introduced to abolish mandatory petitions for candidates. Instead they would pay a filing fee. The bill applied both to primary petitions and general election petitions.
I like the general idea of filing fees instead of petitions. But I do see one problem with it. If two people pay the filing fee for the same office and they both want to be the Libertarian Party nominee, what would happen then? Would they both be on the ballot, splitting the Libertarian Party vote. Illinois only holds primaries for the Democratic and Republican parties. In a case like that, how would the Libertarian nominee be decided? The bill sponsored in the legislature last year did not deal with this problem.