California State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) has introduced SB 712. Like AB 141, it would provide that write-in candidates in June primaries, for Congress or partisan state office, could not appear on the November ballot, even if they placed second in the primary, unless they get a substantial number of write-in votes.

In 2012, there were eight offices for which only one person filed to appear on the primary ballot. In six of them, however, a write-in candidate filed and naturally the write-in candidate (or one of them) then appeared on the November ballot. If this bill had been in effect at the time, none of the primary write-in candidates would have appeared on the November ballot. Instead of two races with only one candidate on the November ballot, California would have had eight such races. It is an insult to a voter to print a ballot with only one candidate on the ballot, and no write-in space, because there is no action for the voter to take that has any effect on the results.

UPDATE: Senator Lara has also introduced a proposed state constitutional amendment, SCA 12. SCA 12 would amend the top-two law to say that only one candidate would appear on the ballot if the candidate who came in second in the primary is a write-in candidate who received fewer than approximately 4,000 votes for US House, and approximately 100,000 votes for statewide office. Even if the legislature passes SCA 12, it would not take effect unless the voters vote for it. It is hard to imagine that the voters of California would vote for a measure to increase the number of one-candidate elections. FURTHER UPDATE: Assemblymember Jeff Gorell has also introduced a proposed state constitutional amendment, ACA 9, which is identical to SCA 12. The Legislative Counsel’s office told Assemblymember Gorell and Senator Lara that their bills would violate the California Constitution, so they will attempt to amend the California Constitution.

On March 11, the Idaho Senate passed SB 1108, which requires statewide initiative proponents to obtain a substantial number of signatures in each of half the legislative districts in the state. All seven Democrats in the State Senate voted against it, but only three Republicans voted against it: Senators Clifford Bayer, Bob Nonini, and Steve Vick. The Senate vote was 25-10. However, at the hearing earlier, the public testimony had been overwhelming against the bill; see this description of the groups and individuals who testified on each side. Thanks to Paul Jacob for this news.

According to each of the 58 county election departments of California, current registration data for each qualified party is: Democratic 7,921,721; Republican 5,216,494; American Independent 475,281; Green 112,881; Libertarian 109,618; Peace & Freedom 61,506; Americans Elect 3,413; unqualified parties and miscellaneous 352,775; no party preference (formerly called “Declines to state”) 3,459,782.

The California Secretary of State will soon release a new registration tally, and that tally won’t match these figures exactly. These figures were obtained by contacting each county elections office. Some counties were more easily able to forward the February 10, 2013 tally data, whereas other counties were not able to do that easily, and so just gave the current tally, which would as of some date in the first twelve days of March 2013. By contrast, when the Secretary of State releases her report, the totals for all counties will be the February 10, 2013 data.

The number of registered voters dropped to 17,713,471. This is because many counties have purged voters who have not voted in either of the last two statewide elections. The purge in Orange County was especially severe, and registration dropped from 1,683,001 in October 2012 to 1,397,665. Orange County registration will rise in the next few weeks as some of the voters who received the postcard will respond that yes, they are still at the same address.

Every qualified political party in California now has a higher share of the registration than it did on the last state tally, the October 22, 2012 tally. The only category that declined as a percentage are the No Party Preference voters, formerly known as Declines to State voters, and also known as independent voters. In raw numbers, because the state registration as a whole declined, all the parties have fewer registered voters now than they did in October 2012, except that the Libertarian Party and Americans Elect have more than they did then. The current total for those two parties is the highest in the history of each of them.