After further review of the petition for the Legal Marijuana Now Party, the Nebraska Secretary of State says it has enough valid signatures and will be on the 2022 ballot. Initially the party was told that it was short in one of the three U.S. House districts, but then more signatures were found valid.
UPDATE: here is a news release.
Arkansas SB 614 makes it more difficult for initiatives to get on the ballot. On April 14 it passed the House. It had already passed the Senate, but because the two houses passed different versions of the bill, it still isn’t through the legislature.
It bans out-of-state circulators. Also it makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis. And it forces initiative proponents to prove that none of their paid circulators have been convicted of a crime. The bill has an urgency clause, section 9, which says the “emergency” is that “criminal canvassers” are working in the state now, and approaching voters and getting personal information about them. Here is the text.
The vote in the Senate as 26-7, and in the House it was 72-18.
The Iowa Libertarian Party has a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, challenging the 2019 action by the Iowa legislature that moved the petition deadline for non-presidential independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, from August to March. That case is Iowa Libertarian Party v Pate, s.d., 4:19cv-241.
On April 20, the Libertarian Party informed the U.S. District Court in Iowa of the March 29, 2021 decision of the Sixth Circuit in Graveline v Benson. In the Graveline case, the Sixth Circuit struck down Michigan’s independent petition procedure. Part of the reason was that the deadline was in July, but the qualified parties didn’t nominate until August.
The Iowa situation is even worse than the Michigan situation had been. In Iowa, the major parties nominate in June, and yet the March deadline for unqualified parties means the unqualified parties must nominate even earlier than March, to give themselves time to complete their candidate petitions.
A decision in Iowa could come at any time. Iowa is not in the Sixth Circuit but the Graveline case should still be influential. Iowa is in the Eighth Circuit.
On March 31, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed HB 2020. Virginia allows all qualified parties to decide for themselves whether to nominate by primary or convention. But the bill says that if a party nominates by convention, it must make provision for persons who can’t attend a convention to participate. That includes overseas voters, persons who are ill, and persons who are temporarily away from the state. Here is the text.
Nevada SB 121, a bill to provide for top-two primaries for Nevada, introduced in February 2021, is officially dead. It failed to advance by the April 10 cutoff.
