On March 6, a California Superior Court struck down California Election code section 3019(c)(2), which lets election officials invalidate mail ballots if the officials think the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the signature on the voter’s registration form. La Follette v Padilla, San Francisco, CPF 17-515931. The flaw in the law is that the voter is never informed that his or her ballot has been rejected, and therefore the voter has no chance to contest the ruling. Approximately one-half of 1% of all California mail ballots are rejected because officials think the signature is invalid. Here is the opinion. Thanks to Thomas Jones and Rick Hasen for the link.

U.S. Senator Thad Cochran is resigning from the Senate on April 1, 2018. His term would ordinarily not have been up until 2020. Mississippi law says his seat will be filled in a special non-partisan election on November 6, 2018. If no one gets 50%, there will be a run-off in December. Mississippi special elections, like Georgia and Texas special elections, are non-partisan, with no party nominees.

Meanwhile, the other Mississippi Senate seat will have a regularly-scheduled partisan election, also on November 6, 2018.

On March 5, the South Dakota Senate State Affairs Committee passed HB 1286. It makes some ballot access improvements but also throws some new impediments into the process.

It moves the non-presidential independent candidate petition deadline from April to June (the presidential independent petition deadline is not affected and continues to be in August). It lowers the number of signatures to qualify a new party from 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, to 1% of the last gubernatorial vote. It moves the party petition deadline from March to July. Those, of course, are all liberalizing changes.

Unfortunately, it appears to require smaller qualified parties (who nominate by convention, not primary) to submit difficult candidate petitions. This part of the bill has no logic. Under the old law, minor party candidates for Governor and Congress needed a petition of 250 signatures to get themselves on the primary ballot. Because minor parties in South Dakota have very few registered members, this 250-signature petition in reality proved almost impossible to satisfy. For example, the Libertarian Party hasn’t completed this petition since 1994 (during the years 1996-2006, the required number for Libertarians was much smaller, generally about 50 signatures). HB 1286 keeps these petition requirements in place, even though there is no logical reason for them. The old law’s petition requirements for primary candidates at least was logical, even if too difficult; the requirement was to keep the primary ballot from being too crowded. But now that there is no more primary ballot for the small qualified parties, there is no rationale for such petitions. See this story.