Kentucky State Senator Reginald Thomas (D-Lexington) has introduced SB 79. It places new restrictions on candidates in special congressional and legislative elections. Kentucky is one of eight states that doesn’t let anyone run for partisan office if the candidate has switched partisan affiliation recently. But these restrictions don’t apply to special elections. SB 79 would extend them to special elections.

Senator Thomas says this is just “closing a loophole”, but there is a sound reason not to apply such restrictions in special elections. Regularly-scheduled elections are predictable events, but special elections are not. They are generally triggered by events that could not have been predicted, such as the death or resignation of an incumbent. Other states with prior affiliation laws don’t apply them to special elections, or at least have a shorter restriction. See this story.

The Republican National Committee decision to require all primaries to be in May or an earlier month does not apply to California, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Those states have June presidential primaries and all three states have Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature. The Republican Party apparently feels it is too difficult to persuade those three states to move their presidential primaries to an earlier date. See this story.

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards has this op-ed in the New York Times, condemning “sore loser” laws. “Sore loser” is actually a term that has come to represent any election law that keeps an otherwise qualified candidate off the general election ballot because he or she was too closely associated with a qualified political party. The term includes not only candidates who run in a partisan primary and lose; it also includes candidates who want to be independent candidates in November but can’t be because they were registered as a member of a qualified party in the recent past; and it also includes laws that force all candidates for a particular office to file on the same deadline, and forces them to choose whether to run in a partisan primary or to file as an independent for the November election.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a Michigan Libertarian Party appeal against Michigan’s “sore loser” law as applied to presidential primaries. If the Edwards op-ed had run in the New York Times a few months earlier, conceivably that might have helped persuade the Court to hear the case.