Ballotpedia has just published a study of the 2012 congressional primaries. Only five members of the U.S. House of Representatives lost a primary to a non-incumbent in 2012. Conventional wisdom, which is wrong, is that more members of Congress fear losing a primary than they fear losing a general election.
On September 11, the California Assembly passed AB 857, the bill to require statewide initiatives to obtain at least 10% of their needed valid signatures via unpaid petition circulators. The bill had passed the State Senate the day before, so now it goes to the Governor.
On September 11, the Eighth Circuit ruled that First Amendment activity cannot be banned inside a public park, just because the park that day is being used for a special purpose. Brian Johnson wanted to hand out free Bibles to persons attending the Twin Cities Pride festival, which is held annually in Loring Park, a 42-acre public park. Park Board rules said that anyone who wanted to hand out literature should rent a booth, but the Pride Festival officials refused to rent him a booth.
The Eighth Circuit opinion, Johnson v Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, 12-2419, says that the alleged reason Johnson was barred from handing out Bibles, that of keeping congestion under control, is not persuasive. The vote was 2-1. The dissenter said that Johnson was free to stand outside the park and hand out Bibles near the park entrance.
Although this case was not about petitioning, the principles it sets forth would apply equally to petitioning.
On September 11, opponents of Arizona’s HB 2305 submitted 146,028 signatures. If the petition has at least 86,405 valid signatures, the bill will not go into effect in 2014. Instead, the voters will vote in November 2014 on whether to repeal the bill.
Among other things, the bill makes it virtually impossible for small qualified parties to nominate candidates by write-in vote in their own primaries, and extremely difficult for their candidates to get on their own party’s primary ballots. See this story about the full list of provisions in the bill, and why the opposition to it is so strong.
Califonia Assemblyman Tim Donnelly’s AB 1117 will not pass this year. The bill would provide that statewide initiative petitions would be shown on the Secretary of State’s web page. Then, anyone who wants to circulate such a petition could print blank petition forms from that web page. The bill had passed the Assembly earlier, but it didn’t pass the Senate Appropriations Committee. Opponents of the idea say the practice would make fraud easier, because an unscrupulous person might print the cover page of two different initiatives, and collect signatures from people who thought they were signing for one initiative, but their signatures would be attached to some other initiative.
If California permitted statewide initiatives on 8.5 inch by eleven inch paper, that problem would be minimized. However, California statewide initiatives must be on legal size paper. Most home printers can’t print documents on legal size paper.
