On February 7, U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin of Massachusetts heard arguments in State of New Jersey v Trump, 1:25cv-10139. There is no opinion yet. Here is a news story about the case. This is the third case involving the definition of birthright citizenship. The other two are in U.S. District Courts in Washington and Maryland.
Five Washington State Senators have introduced SB 5225, which requires primary candidates to submit a petition along with the 1% (of the annual salary) filing fee. Currently candidates for Congress and partisan state office don’t need signatures to get on the primary ballot.
The bill requires 1,000 signatures for statewide office; 750 for U.S. House; and 500 for state legislature. Here is the text.
Washington has a top-two system, and there are always many candidates on the primary ballot for Governor and U.S. Senator. Sometimes there are as many as thirty.
The sponsors are four Democrats (Marko Liias, T’wina Nobles, Marcus Riccelli, and Sharon Shewmake) and one Republican (Drew MacEwen).
This newspaper story has details about the new higher petition requirements in New Jersey, which were increased earlier this month and which take effect immediately.
Three South Carolina Representatives have introduce HB 3557, which would require that candidates nominated in convention must pay filing fees. The authors are Brandon Newton (R-Lancaster), Fawn Pedalino (R-Manning), and Bill Taylor (R-Aiken).
The U.S. Supreme Court said in Lubin v Panish (1974) that filing fees are unconstitutional unless they are needed for the purpose of keeping ballots from being too crowded. There is no problem with crowded primary ballots when parties nominate by convention. South Carolina lets each party decide for itself whether to nominate by primary or convention, but the two major parties always use primaries and all the minor parties always use conventions.
On January 30, the North Dakota House Government & Veterans Affairs heard testimony on HB 1297 and HB 1307. The first bill would ban Approval Voting and ranked choice voting. The second would say that no charter city could have any election rules that vary from state election rules. The Committee has not taken any action on either bill. See this story.
