Maine Bill for Ranked Choice Voting in State General Elections

On April 2, Maine Representative Janice Cooper (D-Yarmouth) introduced LD 1477. It extends ranked choice voting to general elections for state office. It begins the process of amending the Maine Constitution. Although Maine now has ranked choice voting for congress, and for state office primaries, the state constitution stands in the way of permitting it for state office general elections.

LD 1477 has a hearing in the Joint Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee on April 10. It needs two-thirds approval in each house.

Libertarian Party May Have Presidential Primary in Sixteen Jurisdictions in 2020

The Libertarian Party may have presidential primaries in as many as sixteen jurisdictions in 2020, which would be more than any party (other than the Democratic and Republican Parties) has ever had. In a few states in the past, though, state Libertarian Parties have declined to have presidential primaries even though they were entitled to them, so it isn’t possible to know now how many Libertarian presidential primaries there will be.

It appears that there could be Libertarian 2020 presidential primaries in Arizona, California, Delaware (although ballot access for candidates is difficult), D.C., Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. There is a possibility of one in New Mexico also, if the state agrees that the party is still entitled to a primary. The New Mexico Secretary of State still lists the Libertarian Party in its voter registration statistics. New Mexico also keeps track of the number of registrants in qualified minor parties, but does not display that data on its web page, so the fact that the Secretary has the Libertarian Party in its chart implies that the party is still considered a party entitled to a primary.

Utah Independent Candidate Suspends Ballot Label Case To Give Legislature a Chance to Solve Problem

Marsha Holland has asked a U.S. District Court to suspend her election law lawsuit until April 1, 2020, because the state elections office has agreed to ask the legislature to fix the problem that she complained about. She was Utah’s only independent candidate on the ballot for any federal or state office in the 2018 election, so she was the only victim of a new law that gives independent candidates a harmful ballot label.

If the legislature does not change the law by early in the 2020 session, the case will be revived. The label says that an independent candidate is “not qualified” to be a party nominee. The case is Holland v Cox, 4:18cv-74.