On April 23, the Oklahoma Senate passed HB 2134 by a vote of 28-16. The bill had already passed the House, but because the Senate added some additional provisions, it must return to the House. Here is the text of the amended bill. UPDATE: the “yes” votes included 19 Republicans and 9 Democrats. The “no” votes included 15 Republicans and one Democrat. The four senators who didn’t vote include two Republicans and two Democrats.
The bill lowers the number of signatures for a newly-qualifying party from 5% of the last vote cast, to 2.5%. If this provision were in effect this year, the number of signatures for 2014 would be 33,372 signatures instead of 66,744.
The bill also lowers the number of signatures for an independent presidential candidate, and the presidential nominee of an unqualified party, from 3% of the last presidential vote, to 2.5% of the last presidential vote. It moves the petition deadline for independent presidential petitions and unqualified party presidential petitions from July 15 to July 1.
The bill also says that presidential electors who don’t vote for the presidential candidate in the electoral college that they were expected to vote for are deemed to have resigned and will be replaced by the other electors. Of course, if the entire slate of electors refused to vote for the expected person, that system wouldn’t work. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.
Do you think this will make it likely that any alternatives will be on the ballot in 2016 in Oklahoma? The signature collection burden still seems unreasonably high.
If this bill had been in effect in 2012, the Libertarian Party would have qualified. The party submitted somewhat more than 50,000 raw signatures in 2012, and is stronger now than it was in 2012.
Who’s behind those faithless elector provisions. States like Montana passed those bills in 2011 on faithless electors.
Uniform Law Commission