Both houses of the Alabama legislature will hold hearings on the ballot access bills on Wednesday, February 5. The Senate bill, SB 70, will be heard by the Senate Constitution, Campaign Finance, Ethics, and Elections Committee at 2 p.m. in Room 727. The House bill, HB 327, will be heard by the House Constitutions and Elections Committee at 9 a.m. in Room 123.
On February 3, the Montana Attorney General conceded that the election law under attack in the federal lawsuit Monforton v Motl is unconstitutional. The case has a hearing February 7 in U.S. District Court in Missoula. The law says that if a candidate for state office mentions an opponent’s voting record, the campaign literature must include the opponent’s entire voting record on that issue over the last six years. See this story. Thanks to Mike Fellows for the link.
The January 1, 2014 print edition of Ballot Access News had a chart showing the petition deadline in each state, for a newly-qualifying party that wants to be on the November ballot for president, with the party name next to the name of the candidate. That chart erroneously said Mississippi has the nation’s earliest such deadline. However, Hawley Robertson, a senior attorney in the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office, says that the actual deadline for a group to qualify as a party in Mississippi, if it just wants to run for president, is less than 90 days before the November election. A party that qualified that late would be too late to have congressional nominees on the ballot, but it could be on the ballot for president with its party label.
Therefore, the correct information is that Alabama has the nation’s earliest petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties in presidential elections. That deadline in 2016 will be March 8, unless the pending lawsuit against that deadline wins, or unless the legislature changes the law.
In half the states, candidates who use the independent candidate petition method can choose a party label instead of just “independent”. The analysis assumes that if a party label is on the November ballot next to the name of the candidate, then the party itself is “on the ballot.”
Bob Bauer’s More Soft Money Hard Law blog has this interesting commentary about the state of federal campaign finance law, in which political parties are uniquely disadvantaged, compared to almost every other kind of organization. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
On January 30, the South Carolina State Election Commission determined that the petition submitted by the American Party has enough valid signatures. The American Party was founded a year ago by Jim Rex, a former Democratic elected Education Superintendent, and Dr. Oscar Lovelace, who had run for Governor in the Republican primary in 2006. In a two-person race against Mark Sanford, Lovelace had polled 35.2%. The new party held a press conference at the State Capitol on January 31 to announce the news.
The party was originally called the Free Citizens Party. It wants to concentrate on local races this year, and its founders will now tour the state, seeking to recruit good candidates. The party says it wants to expand across the nation in 2016.
This is the first party to successfully petition in South Carolina since 2012, when Americans Elect qualified. It never ran any candidates, but is still on the ballot. It will be removed from the ballot if it fails to run any candidates in 2014.
The American Party submitted 16,000 valid signatures in order to qualify, and gathered signatures in each of the 46 counties. Thanks to Andy for the news.
