No winner has yet been determined in the New York State Senate race, 46th district. See this story, which says that only 8 previously uncounted ballots were examined on Thursday, January 17 (today). But another 91 ballots will probably be counted on Friday, January 18.
The South Dakota Secretary of State’s omnibus bill, HB 1018, would allow a ballot-qualified party to tell the Secretary of State that it no longer wishes to be ballot-qualified. The national chair and the state chair would both be required to sign paperwork, ending the party’s qualified status. The bill seems faulty because it is entirely possible that a party ballot-qualified in South Dakota might not have a national chair, or any national officers. There are many ballot-qualified parties in the United States that are not part of a national party organization. Such parties exist currently in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Vermont.
Americans Elect is a ballot-qualified party in South Dakota currently, because it successfully petitioned in 2011, and in South Dakota, once a party petitions, it remains on the ballot until it has gone through a gubernatorial election and failed to poll 2.5% of the vote for Governor. South Dakota, like most states, doesn’t elect its Governor in presidential years, so Americans Elect is now ballot-qualified for 2014.
The bill also provides that a candidate cannot notarize his or her own ballot access petition. And it makes it illegal for a group to circulate a petition for party status more than one year before that petition is due.
Pennsylvania State Senator Mike Folmer (R-Lebanon) has introduced SB 195, to ease ballot access for minor parties and independent candidates. This is the third session in which he has introduced this bill. It sharply reduces the number of signatures for independent candidates. For minor parties, the law would be similar to the Delaware law, in which a group that persuades a reasonable number of voters to register into the party would be on the November ballot automatically, and would nominate by convention. Thanks to Bob Small for this news. The bill is not yet on the state legislature’s web page.
Oklahoma State Senator Rob Johnson (R-Kingfisher) has introduced SB 668, which does not improve ballot access for newly-qualifying parties in presidential election years, but which does improve it in midterm years. The bill retains the 5% figure for calculating the number of signatures, but it changes the base from the last vote cast, to the last vote cast in a midterm year. If this bill were in effect now, the 2014 requirement would be 51,739 instead of the actual requirement of 66,744.
In 2011, the Oklahoma House had passed HB 1058, which lowered the number of signatures to exactly 22,500. But the Senate in 2012 had amended it to 5% of the last midterm vote cast, exactly what the new 2013 bill does. In the last session, the two houses never held a conference committee to straighten out the two versions of the bill, so nothing passed.
Senator Johnson is the Vice-Chair of the Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee. In the last session he was the Chair of the Senate Rules Committee. Also in the last session, he was the lead sponsor of the National Popular Vote Plan bill, which didn’t pass in Oklahoma.
None of these bills makes any change at all to the March 1 petition deadline. Oklahoma legislators seem never to notice that there have been 51 constitutional ballot access cases in which petition deadlines that early for newly-qualifying parties or independent candidates have been struck down. There are no precedents in any state upholding such an early deadline. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.
On January 16, the Third Circuit upheld a Pennsylvania law that bars anyone other than voters and polling place officials from being inside a polling place. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had sued to overturn the law, arguing that it desired to place reporters and photographers inside polling places on election day to observe the voter sign-in process. The case is PG Publishing Company v Aichele, 12-3863. The decision is 52 pages.
