Ten Maine legislators have introduced LD 1083, which would use ranked choice voting for president in the general election. Although Maine already uses ranked choice voting for congress, it has never permitted it for president.
The bill would also provide for ranked choice voting in Maine’s presidential primary, if Maine has a presidential primary. A bill introduced in January 2019 to provide for a 2020 presidential primary, LD 245, is still in committee.
On March 1, the North Carolina State Board of Elections posted the dates for the upcoming special election to fill the vacancy in the 3rd U.S. House seat. The seat is vacant because Congressman Walter B. Jones died on February 10, 2019.
The primary will be April 30. If the primaries for all parties that hold a primary (Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian) produce a candidate who gets the most votes and gets at least 30%, then there is no runoff primary. But if no one gets 30% in any party’s primary, then there must be a runoff primary for that party or parties, to be held on July 9. If there is a runoff primary, the special election will be September 10. If there is no need for a runoff primary, then the special election will be July 9.
Independent candidates need 6,998 valid signatures, due April 15. The petition deadline, for submission of the signatures to the county election boards, is 15 days before the petitions are due at the State Board of Elections. The checked petitions are due at the State Board of Elections on primary day, April 30. Thus independent candidates only have one and one-half months to collect a large number of signatures. This requirement is almost surely unconstitutional, given the short petitioning period. In a regular election an independent has two years to collect signatures. The number of signatures is 1.5% of the number of registered voters in the district.
On February 28, both houses of the Hawaii legislature passed the presidential candidate tax returns bills on second reading. “Second reading” does not formally pass a bill, but it is easy to predict that such bills will pass on “third reading”, after they have passed second reading. The bills are SB 94 and HB 712.
The bills bar presidential candidates from the general election ballot if the candidate has not released tax returns. The bills also bar presidential electors from voting for a presidential candidate who has not released returns. There is no presidential primary in Hawaii so the bill, if passed, has no effect before the general election.
On February 27, the National Popular Vote bill was introduced in the Delaware legislature. SB 22 is co-sponsored or sponsored by 13 State Senators and 25 Representatives. The Delaware Senate has 21 members and the Delaware House has 41 members. This means that a majority of members of each house are sponsoring the bill. This makes it extremely likely that the bill will pass.
On March 1, the Ohio Libertarian Party filed two lawsuits in state trial court. One attacks the law that says the Ohio Election Commission will never have any members of parties other than the two largest parties. The other lawsuit challenges the failure of the Ohio Election Commission to enforce the law, when the Ohio Debates Commission barred the Libertarian 2018 gubernatorial candidate from debates and didn’t set out any objective criteria for those debates.
The law provides that members of the commission will consist of four members of the largest parties, four members of the second-largest party, and one person who is not a member of any party. Therefore, no member of any other party may ever be a member of the Commission.
