On April 10, the Missouri House passed HB 126, which restores presidential primaries for all qualified parties. Missouri didn’t have any government-administered presidential primaries in 2024, although it had them in earlier years.
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On April 8, the Georgia Libertarian Party filed this reply brief in the Eleventh Circuit in Cowen v Raffensperger, 24-13164. This is the lawsuit against the petition requirements for U.S. House, for candidates who are not members of a party that had polled 20% of the vote for President or Governor in the last election.
HB 293, which moves the even year midterm primaries from June to the second Tuesday in March, was approved in the Mississippi House and Senate on April 1 and had been sent to the Governor’s office. No action has been taken there yet. Governor Tate Reeves has until April 24 to act on the legislation. The bill would change the deadline to qualify a new party from February to January in midterm years.
Here is a link to the current bill.
Earlier this month, HB1169 failed to become law in South Dakota. It would have required initiatives that would change the state Constitution to collect the signatures of 5% of the last gubernatorial vote in each of the state’s 35 legislative districts.
HB1169 passed the SD House and Senate in March, but was vetoed by Governor Larry Rhoden on March 31. The House had passed it by a wide margin, but the Senate passed it by only a 19-15 vote in March. Consequently, the Senate vote in April to override the Governor’s veto failed, and the bill died.
On March 12, SB209 and SB210 were signed into law by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
SB210 mandates that a circulator read the summary of the initiative to any potential signer. Sometimes the summary is long and detailed and can require as much as five minutes to be read aloud. If the circulator doesn’t obey this law, it will be considered a criminal act.
SB209 says that if a petitioner is found to have committed any crimes, none of the signatures he or she obtained are valid.
There are other bills that were recently passed in Arkansas that greatly injure the initiative process. The sponsor of all these bills was Senator Kim Hammer (R-Benton).
BAN has learned that there is likely to be upcoming litigation challenging the constitutionality of these and the other Arkansas anti-initiative laws that were covered in the April 1 edition of Ballot Access News.