On March 22, Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon D. Fox said he is resigning as Speaker. During 2013 he had single-handedly blocked a bill to repeal the straight-ticket device. HB 5072 failed to pass in 2013 even though a majority of the House membership had committed to voting for the bill. Election returns from 2012 showed that Fox would have been defeated in the 2012 general election without the votes he received from voters who used the straight-ticket device.

In the 2014 session of the legislature, bills are pending to abolish the straight-ticket device. They are SB 2091 and HB 7512. They had not made any headway yet this year. The session ends in June 2014. It is not known if these bills will now make some progress. The House is caucusing on Sunday, March 23, to choose a new speaker.

On March 12, the Colorado House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee defeated HB 1062 by 3-8. This is the bill to let local governments use Approval Voting for non-partisan elections. Approval Voting lets a voter vote for as many candidates as desired, even though only one is to be elected.

Three of the four Republicans on the Committee voted for the bill, but one Republican, and all seven Democrats, voted against it. This was somewhat surprising given that the House sponsor is a Democrat, and the ACLU, Common Cause, and the League of Women Voters testified in favor of the bill. The bill was also supported by Colorado’s three ballot-qualified minor parties. Thanks to Jeff Orrok and Frank Atwood for this news.

On March 20, the South Carolina House Judiciary Committee passed HB 4732. This is the bill that says the government will pay for the administration of presidential primaries. The only qualified parties that may have presidential primaries are those which polled at least 5% for President in the last election.

South Carolina is the only state in the nation in which no party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, has ever polled as much as 5% for President. South Carolina did not have elections for president before 1868; the legislature chose the presidential electors. When Strom Thurmond ran for President in 1948, although he carried South Carolina, he was the nominee of the Democratic Party of South Carolina, and President Truman was an independent candidate.

In 1956, presidential elector candidates pledged to U.S. Senator Harry Byrd were on the South Carolina ballot, and they polled 29.45%. But they were on the ballot as independent candidates, not as nominees of a party. The ballot label was “Nomination by Petition.”

In 1996, when Ross Perot was the Reform Party nominee, he polled over 5% for President in every state. But in South Carolina, which permits fusion, he was on the ballot twice, once as the Patriot Party nominee and once as the Reform Party nominee. He polled 3.21% as the Patriot nominee and 2.39% as the Reform nominee, so neither of his two parties themselves polled as much as 5% for President.