Maine Representative Kevin Battle of South Portland has told the press that he is changing his enrollment from “Republican” to “independent.” See this story. Thanks to Tom MacMillan for the link.
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North Dakota Representative Corey Mock has introduced a bill to make it easier for parties to nominate candidates. Currently North Dakota is the only state that says a ballot-qualified party can’t nominate unless a certain minimum number of votes choose to vote in that party’s primary. Other states that had such laws in the past have repealed them. The bill number hasn’t been assigned yet.
Because of the current North Dakota restriction, no minor party candidates for the legislature have been on the November ballot since 1976. The current law requires only 300 primary votes for statewide candidates, and normally any party has that many voters in its primary, and statewide candidates therefore do qualify for the general election. But for legislature, the current law requires approximately 120 primary voters within that district to choose that party’s primary ballot. North Dakota legislative districts have such low populations, this means approximately 10% to 15% of all the primary voters in that district must choose the minor party’s primary ballot, which is not realistic. North Dakota has open primaries and all voters on primary day are free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
The bill also slightly changes the number of signatures needed for a new party to qualify. Current law requires exactly 7,000 signatures. The bill changes this to 1% of the state’s population at the last sentence. If the bill were enacted, the requirement would be 6,745 signatures.
On January 5, the New Hampshire Secretary of State advised all the town clerks that voters can now register as members of the Libertarian Party, and that those registrations should be tallied. This happened because the party regained its qualified status on November 8, 2016, when it polled over 4% for Governor. Thanks to Darryl Perry for this news.
On January 5, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan held oral argument in Level the Playing Field v Federal Election Commission, 1:15cv-1397. The issue is whether the FEC has a duty to determine whether the Commission on Presidential Debates is breaking federal campaign finance law when it lets the Commission spend corporate-donated money on the general election presidential debates. UPDATE: here is a news story about the hearing.
Judge Chutkan said that it appears the FEC did not evaluate the voluminous evidence presented to it that the Commission is, indeed, in a realistic sense, contributing to the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. She asked the attorney for the FEC how she could defer to the FEC when it appears the FEC hasn’t done a real analysis.
On January 4, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced S.26, which requires major party presidential candidates to file a copy with their federal income tax returns with the Federal Election Commission, and also requires sitting presidents to release their tax returns. Here is the bill. It has ten co-sponsors.
“Major party” presidential nominees are those whose party received at least 25% of the vote in the previous presidential election.
If the candidate does not release the tax return, the FEC will then ask the IRS to release it to the FEC, so that the public can see it. This is a far better approach than using ballot access laws to compel release of the return.