On January 29, Indiana State Senator Victoria Spartz (R-Noblesville) co-sponsored SB 571, the bill that eases the Indiana ballot access laws for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties. The bill’s main sponsor is Senator Greg Walker, Chair of the Senate Elections Committee. That committee has five Republicans and two Democrats. The committee heard the bill on January 28 but has not yet voted on it.
Eleven Hawaii State Senators have introduced SB 119, which says that a presidential elector who votes for someone in the electoral college who did not get the most popular votes in Hawaii would be deemed to have resigned. The remaining electors would choose a replacement.
The Hawaii Senate only has 25 members, so this bill seems somewhat likely to pass the Senate, if it has eleven sponsors.
In December 2016, a Hawaii Democratic presidential elector voted in the electoral college for Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton.
The bill says if the presidential candidate who carried Hawaii has died or become “mentally disabled”, then electors are free to vote for someone else. The bill does not explain who would decide if the presidential or vice-presidential candidate is now mentally disabled.
Hawaii House Bill 31, which would delete the column on petitions that asks the signer to show the last four digits of his or her social security number, will be heard in the House Judiciary Committee on January 31 at 2 p.m.
American Bridge and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee recently declared publicly that they will do everything they can to injure Howard Schultz if he runs for president in 2020 as an independent. See this story.
Also, on January 28, Andrew Tanenbaum, who founded the web page electoral-vote.com, wrote “Democrats are not powerless to stop Schultz if they really want to. They have a trifecta in 14 states, including Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. That means they can pass any laws they want to. For example, they could pass a law requiring independent candidates or new parties to get the signatures of 20% of the registered voters in every one of the state’s counties in order to qualify for ballot access. In practice, no one could ever do that, but states have broad authority to determine the rules for elections, so that might well stand up in court. Faced with such a barrier, Schultz, who is not well known, might decide to forget the whole thing.”
Attorneys for Utah state government have filed this brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Utah Republican Party v Cox, 18-450. The state government asks the Court to refuse to hear the case. The issue is whether the Constitution protects a party’s right to decide how to nominate.
The state’s brief reads as though the Republican Party doesn’t want to nominate by primary. Actually the party does want to nominate by primary. But it wants to keep candidates off its primary ballot unless they have substantial support at a pre-primary endorsements meeting. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
