On December 12, the North Carolina legislature reversed itself, and passed a bill providing that if a new election is held in the U.S. House 9th district race, new primaries will also be held. This means that the Green and Constitution Parties, which did not contest this race last month, would be free to hold new conventions and nominate. The three parties with primaries are Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian, and all three of those parties did have nominees for the 9th district on the ballot last month, so probably all three of those parties will have new primaries.
The vote in the House for HB 1029 was 81-18; in the Senate, 34-3.
Any Fed indictments of the ANTI-Democracy FELON hacks involved [yet] ???
The current law is ambiguous. If a vacancy occurs after the primaries for a full term, the candidates for the remainder of the vacant term are the nominees for the full term.
For example, the current incumbent in NC-9, Mark Pittenger was defeated in the May 2018 primary. He is still the representative until January 3rd. But if he had resigned, after the primary, the candidates for the short term would be those nominated for the full term.
If the election is declared void, it would seem to me that the seat for the 2019-2021 term is vacant, and it is well before the 2020 primary, there should be primaries, just as it the representative had died or resigned.
But perhaps it might have been interpreted as simply a redo of the general election. There is a possibility that even if the result were certified, the House would reject the result.
North Carolina does not conduct primaries if fewer than two candidates file. North Carolina Libertarian’s did have one contested congressional race in 2018. Turnout was around 700 vs. 67,000 for the Democratic primary in the district. There was no Republican primary in that district.
There were only 25 Democratic and 23 Republican primaries for 120 NC House districts (20% of races)
In NC-9, the losing Democratic candidate in the primary who had been the party’s nominee in 2016, Christian Cano, endorsed the Libertarian candidate, Jeff Scott. Cano said that Democratic nominee who had never voted in a primary before 2017), was “beholden to the corporate deep pockets in Nancy Pelosi’s political machine.”
To the extent progressive voter’s followed Cano’s lead it might have cost Dan McCready the election. Scott received about 5 time the number of votes as the gap between candidates.
Where is that MODEL ELECTION LAW ??? — to have ZERO ambiguous junk.
How many USELESS election law so-called profs in the world ???
It seems to me the Republicans held House evidently knew something was wrong and rushed this legislation through in order to force a Primary Election due to cheating in the 9th District. We as Citizens should not have to pay for another election due to the cheating of one party. If that party cheats then the seat should automatically go to the other person. This would tend to cut down on graft in politics and help the public to have more confidence in our elections. Evidently the Republicans knew this was going on as did others back in 2016 and nothing was done about it. This is why the public has lost confidence in our voting system. No one is watching the henhouse and our elections are being stolen. That plus the gerrymandering in our Great State is another reason for the apathy in voters.
It is time to clean up the system and save our Great State and Nation before it is too late. Freedom is not free, we must work on it each day to keep it safe.