On February 15, two Virginia ballot access improvements made headway.
SB 1049, which says that inactive voters may sign candidate petitions, passed the House Privileges and Elections Committee. The bill had already passed the Senate. The bill also sets up appeal procedures when the candidate is told his or her petition lacks enough valid signatures.
SB 690, which reduces the number of signatures for all presidential candidates (both those running in a presidential primary, and those attempting to get on the November ballot) from 10,000 to 5,000, passed the House Privileges and Elections Committee. This bill had also already passed the Senate.
Finally, the Senate amended HB 1346, a bill that originally only reduced the number of signatures for presidential primary candidates and which had already passed the House. The Senate amended HB 1346 to include general election presidential candidates as well. Then the Senate passed it, 27-12. At this point, SB 690 and HB 1346 are now identical, and it won’t make any difference which one is finally passed. Both the House Committee, and the full Senate, have now expressed themselves as favoring reducing the number of signatures for all presidential candidates, primary and general alike. It seems very likely that one or the other of these two identical bills will soon be on the Governor’s desk.
Did both parties have trouble with getting their presidential candidates on the ballot? We heard about folks like Newt, so I wonder if Democrats would vote against these types of bills.
Virginians may have forgotten, but in 2008, Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, who was seeking the Democratic nomination, tried and failed to get on the Virginia presidential primary ballot. So did Mike Gravel.
Generally Democrats have less trouble with the Virginia presidential primary petition because the state party collects about 5,000 signatures for each Democrat whom the party considers a legitimate candidate.
This is great news for North Carolina as our ballot access bill will be introduced in about a week.
Richard:
Do BOTH of those bills to reduce the petition requirement to 5,000 signatures also eliminate the requirement to collect 400 signatures per Congressional District?
Both bills keep the distribution requirement, but both bills ease it from 400 sigs in each district, to 200 sigs.