On February 7, a subcommittee of the Virginia House Privileges and Elections Committee unanimously passed HB 1151. It says that petitions for U.S. Senate and U.S. House may circulate using the old U.S. House districts, if the new districts aren’t settled by January 1 of the election year. The bill has an urgency clause so it can go into effect immediately on being signed. It covers primary petitions and general election petitions.
U.S. Senate petitions are affected because Virginia requires 400 signatures from each U.S. House district on any statewide petition.
The bill ought to include the same solution for presidential petitions, but it doesn’t. No one in the Virginia legislature seems to know or care that minor party and independent candidates for President are unable to circulate now, because the petitions must include one candidate for presidential elector from each U.S. House district. Also presidential petitions have the same 400-signature requirement from each district. It would be eminently sensible to expand HB 1151 to cover presidential petitions, but that idea has been suggested to the sponsor and he has declined to amend his bill to fix the presidential petition problem. Virginia activists ought to be publicizing this problem. Virginia law lets presidential petitions include a stand-in presidential candidate, and says presidential petitions may state to circulate on January 1. Clearly, the intent of the law is to permit presidential petitioning right now, yet in reality such petitioning is impossible because of the U.S. House district boundary problem.
About “emergency legislation” in Virginia:
Section 14 of article 4 of the state’s constitution prescribes the date legislation becomes effective. Legislation from a regular session of the legislature becomes effective the first day of July “unless in the case of an emergency (which emergency shall be expressed in the body of the bill) the General Assembly shall specify an earlier date by a vote of four-fifths of the members voting in each house.”
http://legis.state.va.us/laws/search/constitution.htm#4S13
On the last Saturday of 2011 the Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, suggested emergency legislation to cure the effect of Virginia’s onerous ballot-access requirements in the upcoming presidential primary of the Republican Party by putting the names of all candidates who qualify for federal matching funds on the ballot, but changed his mind the next day–after, I imagine, through an informal poll around Richmond he learned he had nowhere near the support of four-fifths of both houses of the legislature.
The lieutenant governor–head of Mitt Romney’s campaign in Virginia and rival candidate of Cuccinelli in the gubernatorial primary next November–Bill Bolling, called the attorney general’s idea “unfair to those candidates who qualified for the ballot,” i.e., his candidate, Mitt Romney. (The governor like Romney and endorsed the lieutenant governor for governor.) Whether the lieutenant governor thought a primary with only two candidates on the ballot fair to the voters, I don’t know. He didn’t say. Whether the question ever entered his mind I don’t know. So far as I can tell, his worries over fairness do not extend beyond the candidate he supports.
Virginia has made access to the ballot in a presidential primary so onerous three candidates did not even attempt to place their names on the ballot in the presidential primary of the twelfth most populous state in the United States–Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman. Two others tried but failed.
Virginia election law calls for a candidate to give a petition to get on the ballot to the State Board of Elections. Why I don’t know, because the State Board of Elections never even opens the sealed petition but instead gives it to the chair of the party of the candidate. The chair of the party–not the State Board of Elections–certifies petitions!
In other years apparently the standard practice was to accept all petitions with 10,000 signatures, no questions asked, although the law calls for signatures of registered voters only. Last October Osborne, an independent candidate for a seat in the state legislature, sued the chair of the Republican Party in the district Osborne was running in because the chair did not bother himself to check whether those who signed the Republican candidate’s petition registered to vote. The chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, Pat Mullins, no doubt not wanting to defend himself in similar lawsuits, with more than half the time candidates had to collect signatures gone (July-December) wrote a letter to the candidates telling them this time he accepts all petitions with 15,000 signatures, no questions asked (about whether those who signed registered to vote) but with a petition with less than 15,000 planned to check whether 10,000 of those who signed registered to vote. Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, with 15,000 signatures, got home free. Although Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry had 10,000 signatures each–enough to get on the ballot in previous years–Pat Mullins refused to certify their petitions because less than 10,000 of those who registered to vote signed each of their petitions. In effect, a mere party official–not the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, State Board of Elections, or the legislature–changed the requirements from 10,000 to 15,000 signatures, an increase of 50%, with less than three of six months left to collect signatures.
I guess they call this democracy in action in the Republican Party of Virginia and in Richmond, but I don’t.
Rick Perry sued, but no court will hear him–or anyone–complain that someone had decided to comply with the law, i.e., to comply with a “technicality” of counting only signatures of persons who registered to vote, so his lawyers, the ACLU in an amicus brief, etc., sought to overturn the election law on grounds of violation of freedom of speech, but Judge Gibney declined to give him injunctive relief because he waited until the eleventh hour to complain about something on Virginia’s books for years. (The legal theory of laches gave the judge grounds to refuse to help Perry because he “slept on his rights.”)