Two Tennessee legislators have introduced bills that amend the election code. The bills prohibit the Secretary of State from placing any presidential candidate on the general election ballot if the candidate is not a natural-born citizen. Here is the text of SB 2625. The other bill, HB 2595, is identical. The sponsors are two Democrats from Nashville, Senator Jeff Yarbro and Representative Jason Powell.
Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan, a Republican, says she wants the legislature to pass a bill ending taxpayer support for administering presidential primaries. Legislative leaders say they agree with her, and will soon introduce such a bill. Inevitably, this would mean there would be caucuses instead of presidential primaries in Arizona, because the parties could not afford to administer presidential primaries on their own.
On January 21, proponents of a top-two system for Arizona filed the text of their initiative. It is almost identical to the proposal submitted by the same people in 2012, which was defeated 662,366 to 1,340,286. However, it does say that if only one or two candidates file for the August primary (for an office that elects one person), the August primary will omit that office from the ballot, and the first vote for that office will be in November. It allows write-in votes in both August and November.
Earlier press reports had said the proponents would delete party labels from the primary and general election ballots, but the text does not eliminate party labels. The text says that the party label printed on the ballots must match the partisan registration of the candidate. The text does not make it clear whether that includes labels which are not the names of qualified parties. Anyone is free to register into any group on Arizona voter registration forms, on the blank line for “party.” If the proponents wished to allow any partisan label without restriction, it seems they would have set a limit on how long that label can be, as Washington state does.
The proposal makes no changes to the presidential primary or the presidential general election. The summary of the initiative implies that under current law, some voters are not able to vote in some primaries. Actually, existing law already guarantees that independents can vote in any partisan primary other than the presidential primary. Anyone who reads the summary would probably be led to believe that if the initiative passed, independents could vote in Arizona presidential primaries, but that would not be true.
The Reform party presidential convention this year will be in Bohemia, New York (on Long Island), July 29-31.
The Mississippi Republican primary ballot will list these 13 presidential candidates: Bush, Carson, Christie, Cruz, Fiorina, Graham, Huckabee, Kasich, Pataki, Paul, Rubio, Santorum, and Trump.
Even though George Pataki and Lindsey Graham have withdrawn from the race, neither filed papers to withdraw their names from the Mississippi ballot, and it is now too late to do that.
