Oklahoma State Senator Lonnie Paxton (R-Tuttle) has introduced SB 1754. It would set up a top-two system. It would not use ranked choice voting.
Senator Paxton is in his second term. In 2020, when he was re-elected, no one ran against him, either in the primary or general election. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for the news about the bill.
The bill would permit election in the primary, which is moved from June to August. No primary would be held for an office if two or fewer candidates filed.
Top X legislation is definitely ballot censorship of voter choice. Oklahoma already outlaws write-in voting. Voter censorship is bipartisan election rigging.
NO WI = SUBVERSION OF 14-2 AMDT – FOR SPECIFIED OFFICES.
Would this include US Senate and Congressional offices or just state offices? If the former, does the provision to permit election in the primary violate a law about when election to a federal office take place?
@Eric L.,
I believe it applies to all elected offices, conceivably including president.
I doubt the author recognized the problem.
It does follow the form that Louisiana attempted after ‘Foster v. Love’ in that if there are only two candidates, the primary is cancelled. In Louisiana, the incumbent was almost always elected in the Open Primary because there were relative few challengers. When there were open seats there were generally several candidates and the election would likely be decided in the runoff held in November.
But this scheme was dened in ‘Daughter of Love v. Blanco’. As it turned out the daughter of the original Love litigant turned 18 between the Open Primary and the General Election. As a minor, she was not able to sue on her own behalf, so her father did. One of the claims brought was that the scheme violated the 26th Amendment because it might deny persons who were 18 on election day set by Congress from voting for that representative, violating the 14th and 26th Amendments.
After this decision, Louisiana went back to having partisan nominations, before realizing how stupid that was.