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.
Under current Nebraska law, a party remains ballot-qualified if it polled 5% for any statewide race at either of the last two elections. Senator Laura Ebke, a Libertarian, has introduced LB 34. It retains the existing law, but says another method for a party to retain qualified status is to have at least 10,000 registered members. At the October 2016 tally the Libertarian Party had 10,935 registered members.
The bill does not appear to allow a group that is not now unqualified to qualify via a registration drive, although that is not clear. Nebraska voter registration forms do not list a blank line in the question about the applicant’s choice of party. There are only checkboxes, and only the qualified parties may have a checkbox. When a party goes off the ballot in Nebraska, all its members are converted to independents. So, without a change in the voter registration form, the option of having 10,000 members is not available to unqualified parties.
Missouri Representative Shamed Dogan (R-Ballwin) has introduced HB 342, which would permit a candidate to file in the primary of more than one party. However, parties that did not wish to allow fusion would be permitted to block it for their own primaries.
