Ohio SB 193, the bill that would remove the Constitution, Green, Libertarian, and Socialist Parties from the 2014 ballot, passed the State Senate on October 8, the same day it had passed the Senate Committee. However, the House does not appear to be eager to rush the bill. It seems unlikely that the bill will move ahead in the House, either this week or next week.
The longer the delay, the stronger the due process argument becomes. The due process argument is that it is unfair to impose a severe petition burden so late in the petitioning season. If the bill had been in effect after the November 2012 election, the parties could have started working then on getting the needed 56,000 signatures for 2014. Imposing the petition requirement in November 2013 would mean that an entire year of the 2014 petitioning period would have been unavailable.
The better due process argument is that any candidates who are attempting to qualify for May 2014 have to file by February 4, 2014. If the law were signed into law today without the urgency clause, it would go into effect 90 days later on January 16.
Given that signers of candidate petitions must have voted in the party primary in 2012, or not have voted at all, it would be reasonable to be gathering signatures now even for local office.
Why is there even a need for SB 193? Were Ohio’s elections somehow tainted by fraud in past elections because these parties were on the ballot?
Are more choices a bad thing?
Ohio doesn’t have any ballot access laws – they are operating under court order.
Ohio requires party nominations to be made by primary. It has a very early primary, so new parties have to qualify in the latter part of odd-numbered years. Federal courts have decided that the combination of number of signatures and the early filing deadline are unconstitutional.
A previous Secretary of State tried to reduce the number of signatures by executive fiat, and the legislature attempted to change the qualification deadline (but later repealed the law because of other provisions). And the federal court appeared to like like these changes any better. Basically, the court has said this is too hard, and Ohio makes it less hard, and the court says that is too hard.
SB 193 realizes that there may be no satisfying the federal court. It instead eliminates nomination by primary, which moves the party qualification deadline by several months.
It would of course be better to switch to Top 2 which eliminates the need for these onerous qualification requirements.