The February 5 Daily Oklahoman carries this letter to the editor from E. Zachary Knight, describing the problems of current Oklahoma ballot access and urging support for the bill pending in the legislature to ease the laws.
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Joey Kennedy, a prize-winning journalist, has this op-ed in the Birmingham News, criticizing Alabama’s ballot access laws. The bill to ease these laws is expected to be introduced this week.
The Virginia bill to legalize out-of-state circulators, HB 1898, has died because it never moved and the deadline for bills to advance from their house of origin has now passed. Meanwhile, the Fourth Circuit will hear arguments over the residency requirement on Wednesday, March 20. The case is Libertarian Party of Virginia v Judd, 12-1996.
On February 8, the Utah legislature passed HB 262. Under current law, anyone can decide to join a party on primary day, and then vote in that party’s primary. But current law says that starting July 1, 2013, voters could no longer do this, and would have to have joined a party a month earlier. The bill eliminates the part of the current law that says the more restrictive policy would commence on July 1, 2013. Therefore, the policy that has been in place for the last several years (letting people join parties as late as primary day) will continue indefinitely.
As expected, Montana Representative Scott Reichner (R-Bigfork) has now introduced his top-two open primary bill. See here to read the bill, HB 436.
Even though the bill is very lengthy, it seems to have skipped over two potential problems: (1) It says that anyone who gets 50% or more of the vote in the June primary is elected. This proposal violates federal law, as applied to congressional elections. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Foster v Love, 522 U.S. 67 (1997) on this point. The bill has an exception but the exception only relates to county office, not Congress; (2) the bill does not re-define “political party”. The existing definition of “political party” is a group that “had a candidate for a statewide office who received a total vote that was 5% or more of the total votes cast for the successful candidate for Governor in either of the last two general elections” or a group that submits 5,000 signatures. But under the bill, parties would no longer have candidates, except for President, so presumably parties would go off the ballot unless they meet the vote test for President.
The bill has an provision that says when two or fewer candidates file for an office, there is no primary and the two (or fewer) candidates for that office only run in November.
The bill handles presidential primaries, and elections for party office, by providing that the section of the ballot concerning those two offices should be somewhat separate, and voters could only vote in that section of the ballot if they place a check-mark on the ballot indicating membership in one particular party. The legislative analyst has suggested that this part of the bill may not be sufficiently protective of party freedom of association and that this part of the bill might be held unconstitutional.
HB 436 is very lengthy and it hasn’t been easy to analyze it with great care; perhaps commenters who are interested in details and who are careful readers will have greater insight into the bill.