Bills have recently been introduced in Oregon, Texas, and Washington, to move the presidential primaries to earlier months. The Oregon bills, HB 2107 and HB 2279, move the entire primary from May to March.
The Texas bill, HB 725, moves the entire primary from March to January.
The Washington bills, SB 5273, SB 5229, and HB 1262, move the presidential primary (but not the primary for other office) from May to March. Thanks to FrontloadingHQ for this news.
Nebraska Senator Justin Wayne (D-Omaha) has introduced LD 98. It lowers the number of signatures for a non-presidential independent candidate for statewide office from 10% of the number of registered voters, to 4,000 signatures.
The state agreed last year not to enforce the 10% petition requirement, so this bill, if passed, merely brings the election code into conformity with actual policy.
Katrina vanden Heuvel has this article in The Nation, defending New York’s fusion law. The article says that few legislators want to repeal fusion, but it also says if Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to ban fusion in New York, he can probably prevail, because Democrats have a majority in both houses of the legislature now and they generally accede to his wishes.
On January 16, independent congressional candidate David Gill filed a notice of appeal in his ballot access case, which challenges the Illinois petition requirement for U.S. House, 5% of the last vote cast. No one has used this petition successfully for that office, if anyone filed a challenge, since 1974. Yet last month a U.S. District Court upheld the law without even allowing a trial. Gill is appealing to the Seventh Circuit, where the case number is 19-1125.
In November 2018, the race for South Carolina Agriculture Commissioner was between the nominees of the Republican, Green, and United Citizens Parties. The two minor party nominees together polled 320,909 votes. David Edmond of the Green Party received 202,238 votes (15.13%), and Chris Nelums of the United Citizens Party received 118,671 (8.88%).
Superficially, these results are not surprising. Generally when only one major party enters a race for a lesser statewide state office, any minor party or independent candidates in that race poll a large share of the vote. But the 2018 Agriculture Commissioner race is newsworthy because such races are so rare in South Carolina. This is the first instance in South Carolina of a statewide race with only one major party candidate running against a minor party candidate since 1990. Back in 1990, the Comptroller race was between a Democrat and a Libertarian, and the Libertarian, David Morris, got 59,558 votes, 10.00%.
There have been some statewide races in South Carolina in recent decades at which only one major party entered a candidate, but in every instance in all the years since 1990, minor parties avoided these races. As for independent candidates, no one has ever successfully petitioned for one of these lesser statewide state offices as an independent in the history of government-printed ballots.
