On June 19, the California Senate Elections Committee passed AB 1436, the bill to permit individuals to register to vote on election day. See this story. Assuming it is signed into law, it won’t be in effect until 2015 at the earliest. By then there will be a means for polling place officials to check the state voter registration database to guarantee that the new voter isn’t already registered somewhere else.

The Senate committee also passed AB 2058, to make it illegal for registration workers to be paid “directly or indirectly” on a per-registration card basis. The vote was 3-2. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Richard Pan, said he will consider amending it later to ease the definition of “political party”. Representatives of the Peace & Freedom Party, and the Libertarian Party, testified that it is not fair to make it more difficult for parties to gain more registrations, and at virtually the same time eliminate them from the ballot unless they have approximately 105,000 registered members (Proposition 14, the top-two open primary, caused that problem).

The Senate Elections Committee also passed AB 2410, which says that persons convicted of certain types of felony may not run for public office. However, the bill was amended to apply only to state and local office; the bill no longer relates to federal office.

Also on June 19, the Assembly Elections Committee passed SB 1272, which says county central committee member elections are for four-year terms, not two-year terms. Candidates for this office will only run in presidential election years, at the primary. The Peace & Freedom Party and the Green Party persuaded the author of the bill to amend the bill, to provide that each state political party will decide for itself who is eligible to run for this office. The bill also expands the petitioning period for candidates to get on the primary ballot for this office.

The Assembly Elections Committee did not hear ACA 10, the measure to make it more difficult for initiatives (to change the California Constitution) to get on the ballot. That bill will probably be heard July 3.

On June 18, the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the Court to leave the recent Ninth Circuit opinion in Gonzalez v Arizona intact, at least for now. The Ninth Circuit had ruled several weeks ago that Arizona must accept the federal voter registration postcard forms. Arizona acknowledges it must accept the forms, but the state requires some add-on questions that are not on the federal form. The Ninth Circuit had construed the federal postcard registration law to mean that the federal form, all by itself, is sufficient and the state can’t require extra information.

The information that Arizona wants is proof that applicants are citizens. The federal form asks people to say under penalty of perjury that they are citizens and otherwise eligible to vote, but does not require additional documentation. See Scotusblog’s report on this case, which includes a link to the MALDEF brief. There is also a link to a second brief, filed by an ally of MALDEF, which discusses the problem that Arizona’s law creates for some residents of American Indian reservations.

Arizona will file a final brief by June 20, and then there will probably be a quick response from the U.S. Supreme Court, to determine if the Ninth Circuit ruling stands during the next few months.