On April 14, the Prohibition Party nominated C. L. Gammon of Tennessee for president, and Phil Collins of Nevada for vice-president. This was done with a telephone conference call. This ticket replaces the one chosen last year.
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On March 27, Missouri HB 26 passed a procedural vote in the House, by a vote of 78-72. It changes Missouri from an open primary state to a closed primary state. It still hasn’t passed the House on final reading. There was to have been a vote on April 2, but it was postponed.
Currently the Missouri voter registration form does not ask applicants to choose a party. The bill would place a question about political party affiliation on the form. It also provides that no one can vote in a party primary unless he or she has been a registered member of that party for at least 23 weeks before the primary.
The bill is flawed in several ways. It does not permit a party to nominate anyone who has not been a member for 23 weeks, but such laws cannot be applied to new parties, according to every court that has considered the matter. It isn’t fair to limit a new party to nominating only those people who had been members, at a point before the party was qualified. New parties don’t submit their petitions until the end of July.
Also the bill doesn’t acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that parties that want independents to vote in their primaries have a right to make that decision. Finally, the bill doesn’t let voters register into an unqualified party.
David Daley and Rob Richie have this article in Real Clear Politics, explaining that several state Democratic Parties will use caucuses that use ranked choice voting in 2020. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
The Arkansas Libertarian Party has between 2,000 and 3,000 signatures on its party petition so far. Thanks to Paul Frankel for this news.
The Nation, venerable weekly magazine published in New York, regularly carries a column by Eric Alterman. The April 15 column mentions that Bernie Sanders was a presidential elector candidate for the Socialist Workers Party in 1980, in Vermont. Although this had not been a complete secret, it is rare that this fact has been mentioned in a publication with wide readership. The general thrust of the column is that voters who want the Democratic Party to win the presidential election of 2020 should not support making Sanders the Democratic nominee. Alterman describes the Socialist Workers Party in 1980 as “Trotskyist” and says in 1980 “it favored the abolition of the U.S. military budget and proclaimed itself in solidarity with both Cuba and Iran at a time when the latter held over 52 Americans hostage.”