On January 8, newly-elected Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, called a special session of the new legislature for January 15-23. Here is his agenda for that special session.
Item 9 mentions candidate filing fees for president and congress. That probably means he wants the legislature to increase them. Currently any independent presidential candidate can get on the November ballot with a filing fee of $500, plus a slate of presidential electors with one from each U.S. House district. The presidential primary filing fee is also $500.
In November 2020, there were twelve presidential candidates on the ballot, more than any other state that year except for Vermont. It may be that the Governor thinks there were too many candidates on the ballot.
The agenda does not call for making it more difficult for parties to attain qualified status. Currently the law requires 1,000 registered voters to be a qualified party.
The Governor also wants to restore the ability of parties to have nominees. Currently Louisiana has no primaries (except for presidential primaries). It only has general elections, and if no one gets 50%, it has run-off elections a few weeks after the general election. See items seven and eleven on the agenda.
Instead of instituting primary elections, they should consider adding Ranked Choice Voting to eliminate the expensive runoff election
Don’t fix what’s not broken.
Rotten commie voting is not needed. The runoff is fine.
Probably fine to increase fees. Inflation and all. The rest is not needed.
Election laws need to be sanitized of all party references. And unless the participating parties are paying 100% for them, abolish the primaries for all but non-partisan offices. Parties should be nominating their candidates by convention or some other overt means and not placing the burden on the taxpayer, 25%+ of whom are independents. With cell phone cameras/videos and various internet public posting sites, the “smoky back room” argument no longer holds.
Fanny Willis is a slut. She is literally on her hands and knees, face down ass up for the Trump persecutor. She is a dirty ho that needs to go.
Jeff Becker makes a good point.
Shame the sluts isn’t wrong either, but Fanny is in Georgia, not Louisiana, and her being a dirty thot has nothing to do with election laws that I know of, particularly in a state the other side of Alabama and Mississippi.
Why don’t we have any fake news links in the comments here yet?
MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDER ROT IN ALL STATES
PARTISAN EXECS/JUDICS ROT IN ALL/MOST STATES
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PR
APPV
TOTSOP
More repetitive screaming bot jargon screeds, please!
Filing fees feel very gimmicky. $500 fees don’t come even close to covering the cost of running the polls. That means their ONLY function is to limit the number of candidates listed on the ballot. Raise the price and less are willing to pay.
But why is many names bad? What does it even mean when they say “frivolous candidates crowd the ballot and lead to voter confusion”? And why is it the government’s role to limit supply, when ballots used to be privately printed?
Frivolous candidates only confuse literal idiots who should have their voting rights stripped for mental incompetence. Getting rid of government ballots would be great.
The fee was probably set before a lot of inflation happened in the interim.
Obviously, any candidate who can’t come up with $500 out of either personal or campaign funds is frivolous, and ought to be a candidate for a low level job and remedial social interaction and hygiene training, not public office.
But, to the extent they could ever present any real problem, it’s only because far too many people are allowed to vote.
They could have a nominal filing fee, say $10.
If more than nine candidates, auction off positions on the ballot.
Alternatively have a citizen jury determine nine candidates. This would be a democratic variant of the system used in France where local government officials endorse presidential candidates. So let’s say for a statewide race such as governor or senator, pick a jury of 1000 registered voters stratified by location.
The potential candidates make a presentation to the jurors. Each juror may approve any candidate. The nine candidates would be selected using a proportional form of approval voting.
Why nine?
@Roman,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven%2C_Plus_or_Minus_Two
Cognitive research demonstrates that most people can only keep about seven things in their head at a time.
Nine may be at the limit that conveniently fits on a ballot. Recall the butterfly ballot in 2000 had 11 candidates on the ballot. There were numerous other counties in Florida that had confusing ballots because of the large number of candidates.
The recent Houston mayoral election had 18 candidates, more than would fit on the screen, using a touch screen. The candidate I wanted to vote for was not shown, nor were the two major candidates. It was easy (for me) to figure out how to scroll to the next screen.
Another race for a city council seat had 9 candidates. My choice was on the first screen. I touched it, but the GUI insisted that I scroll to the second page to see all candidates in the race.
If you look at the mayoral race, or gubernatorial or senate races in California, the gubernatorial race in Louisiana or Alaska, you will see that when you get down to the 9th or 10th place candidate the candidates have 1% or less of the votes.
Most races other than the top of the ballot races such as president, governor, or senator, which tend to draw vanity candidates, don’t have so many as 9 candidates.
I think the biggest problem is far too many people being allowed to vote.