On April 7, the Texas House Defense and Veteran Affairs Committee amended HB 111, so that now the bill moves the date of the Texas primaries. Currently, the primary for all office is in early March. The bill moves the primary to the first Tuesday in April, which in 2012 would be April 3. If enacted, this change would automatically move the petition deadline for new and minor parties from May, to June. It would also automatically move the petition deadline for independent candidates (for office other than President) to early July.
Ironically, however, it would not move the independent presidential petition deadline, because that type of petition is not keyed to the date of the primary. So independent presidential candidate petitions would still be in early May. With later filing deadlines for independent candidates for other office, it would be absurd and almost certainly unconstitutional to require presidential independents to file that early. It is somewhat likely that the bill will be amended again to handle this problem. Thanks to Jim Riley for this news.
Technically, they “considered” amending HB 111. A committee first brings up a bill for consideration as it was presented on 1st Reading to the House, and then a committee substitute is introduced, it can be anything from a word changes, to a complete rewrite. Both the original bill and the committee substitute are considered in the hearing. If the committee is not going to report a bill or substitute at that meeting, the committee substitute is withdrawn, and the original bill is left pending.
When they actually get around to reporting legislation back to the House, they will continue consideration of the original bill, propose another committee substitute, and then vote on reporting the committee substitute. It will then be the committee substitute that will be considered by the full house on 2nd reading.
As a consequence of this procedure, there is no version of the committee substitute online. The original HB 111 is about procedures for military voters, and in particular provides that absentee ballots be mailed out 45 days prior to any election in which federal candidates are on the ballot.
After allowing time for ballots to be prepared, this requires about 70 days from filing deadline and an election; or be between a primary and a runoff. As a consequence, Texas is having to rework its primary schedule, and the details are what is in the committee substitute.
Various deadline dates were inferred from a primary on the 1st Tuesday in April, and current deadlines that are set relative to the primary date and the runoff date. Some of these offsets were defined when the primary was in May and the runoff in June, and made sense based on that calendar. When the primary was move to March in 1988, these started getting dragged around.
This should be helpful for folks like America Elects.
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