On January 24, the South Dakota House unanimously passed HB 1035, which makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis, if they are circulating a petition to put a new or previously unqualified party on the ballot. The bill now goes to the Senate Committee.
South Dakota already has a similar law in place for candidate petitions and initiative petitions. Thanks to Rob Richie for news of this bill.
On January 27, a 3-judge U.S. District Court ordered the Wisconsin legislature to redraw the state’s legislative district boundaries by November 1, 2017. This was no surprise, because the same court on November 21, 2016 had struck down the boundaries as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The case is Whitford v Gill, w.d., 15-cv-421.
Wisconsin is the third state in which courts have recently ordered re-drawing of either congressional districts or legislative districts. The other two are Alabama and North Carolina. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily (at least) blocked the North Carolina redistricting.
Wisconsin will attempt to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the Whitford order. Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news.
Wyoming is one of the few states that has never had a presidential primary. Representative David Northrup (R-Powell) has introduced HB 201, which would provide for presidential primaries. They would be on the third Tuesday in April. The bill is quite long but seems not to explain how a candidate would get on a presidential primary ballot.
Washington representative Zack Hudgins (D-Tukwila) has introduced HB 1469, to move the presidential primaries from the fourth Tuesday in May to the second Tuesday in March. The bill retains the aspect of the existing law that allows the date to be moved if the major parties agree to another date.
The bill also provides that the votes should be tallied so that the public and the parties would received two different vote totals for each candidate. There would be a tally for voters who were willing to sign in as party members, and a tally for voters who said they do not intend to join a party. The parties could use either set of election returns to determine who had been elected as a delegate to the national convention.
A U.S. District Court in Virginia will hear De La Fuente v Alcorn on February 17, Friday, at 10 a.m. The issue is the law that requires candidates for presidential elector to reveal their full Social Security number before an independent presidential petition may begin to circulate. Part of the reason for this requirement is that the Virginia Constitution requires voters to reveal their full social security number just in order to register to vote. So many Virginia official election forms require the full SSN for various other purposes, including declarations of candidacy. De La Fuente argues that many potential presidential elector candidates for him refused to run because they didn’t want to reveal their full SSN.
A bill is pending in the legislature that would begin the process of changing the state constitution, to delete the requirement that voter registration forms show the full SSN. It is HJR 552, by Delegate James LeMunyon (R-Herndon).
No other state constitution goes into such detail about what must be on a voter registration application.
