On March 23, the Louisiana House and Government Affairs Committee defeated HB 563. The bill would have let any candidate have “independent” on the ballot instead of a party name. The bill applied to all candidates, even members of qualified parties, and this is one reason it was defeated. A representative of the Secretary of State testified against it. See this story. Here is a copy of the bill. The author is an independent member of the House, Representative Jerome “Dee” Richard. One wonders why he didn’t write the bill to apply only to candidates who are not members of a qualified party.
He probably didn’t write the bill anyway. Someone in legislative services wrote the bill and he introduced it. Isn’t that the way things work? I’ve heard of questions being asked of a legislator about bills they didn’t write and couldn’t answer those questions.
HB 563 is 1:36:35 into the video of the committee hearing.
In Louisiana, a candidate can be registered with one of the five recognized parties: Democratic, Green, Libertarian, Reform, or Republican; No Party; or Other (non-recognize) Party. If a voter writes anything on his registration form he is considered to be registered with that other party. There are around 50,000 “Independent” registrations plus other variations including misspellings.
A session or two ago, Richard had a similar bill. It got sidetracked, but there was a senate bill that permitted formation of the Independent Party, which he then backed. Since there are 50,000 voters who are registered as “Independent” the party could easily be recognized if someone would submit $1000 and bylaws.
The SOS was not necessarily opposed to the concept per se, but was pointing out that it was in conflict with the bill that had just been passed. It was pointed out that a substantive amendment would require 24-hours notice.
One reason that the bill might have been written in the way it was is that Richard is currently registered with an other party, the currently unrecognized “Independent” (party). If he were permitted to describe himself as “independent” then there is no reason not to let voters registered with other parties, recognized or not, to do the same.
The logical solution would be to eliminate partisan registration, and let candidates use whatever description they wanted on the ballot.
If they wanted to have a presidential preference primary, they could let voters indicate their party affiliation when they voted. If a party wanted to, they could give a voter permission to do so. The parties would be free to interpret the results in whatever way they wanted to.
Incidentally, there is a bill that would permit withdrawal up to closing time on election day. Currently, the withdrawal date is 9 days after the filing deadline.