Tennessee State Senator Frank Niceley (R-Strawberry Plains) has introduced SB 1883. It would abolish primaries for U.S. Senate. Instead, members of the state legislature who are members of a particular party would nominate their party’s U.S. Senate nominees.
As of January 30, the Alabama Libertarian Party has 49,000 raw signatures on its party petition for 2022. It needs 51,588 valid. The deadline is in early May 2022. Assuming the party qualifies, 2022 will be the first election in Alabama since 2002 that voters will have seen someone who is not a Republican or Democratic nominee on their ballot for statewide office (other than president, which requires 5,000 signatures for an independent).
On January 28, U.S. District Court judge Steve C. Jones rejected a request from Georgia to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the state’s legislative districts. The state had argued that Voting Rights Act cases challenging legislative redistricting need a three-judge court, but the judge rejected that notion. Here is the ruling in Grant v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:22cv-122.
The redistricting lawsuits currently underway in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina will have a big impact on ballot access in 2022 in those states, for independent candidates running for district office. Courts have ruled many times that when the normal petitioning time is shortened due to late redistricting, states must reduce the ballot access barriers for those district offices. The longer these lawsuits take to resolve the new districts, the more those precedents apply, because no petitioning can be carried out before the district boundaries are settled.
The Georgia cases will also have a big impact on minor party candidates as well. That is not true for the other three states mentioned above, because in those other three states, one petition can put all nominees on the ballot for all office. But in Georgia, the statewide party petition for minor parties does not cover district office. Georgia is the only state which has a minor party petition procedure (one that doesn’t need to name any particular candidates) yet that petition is only good for statewide office, not district office.
On January 28, the New Mexico House Government, Elections & Indian Affairs Committee passed HJR 5, a proposed constitutional amendment that would let independent voters choose a partisan primary ballot. Arizona and Colorado have similar provisions. Here is the text of HJR 5, which is sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat.
On the evening of January 28, the U.S. Supreme Court requested the plaintiffs in the Alabama U.S. House redistricting case to respond to the state’s brief by Wednesday, February 2. Merrill v Milligan, 21A375.
