On April 2, the Oklahoma House Judiciary Committee passed SB 668 unanimously. It has no effect on the number of signatures needed for a newly-qualifying party in presidential years. But it lowers the number in midterm years, so that if the bill becomes law, the two types of years will have an equal signature burden (5% of the last gubernatorial vote).
The bill is now three-fourths of the way through the legislature. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.
An earlier post today is not completely accurate, but instead of my amending that post (on Pennsylvania presidential write-ins from November 2012) it seems more useful to write a new one. It turns out that the Pennsylvania state Elections Department itself tallied up the write-ins for two particular presidential candidates. The state says Virgil Goode got 383 write-ins and Tom Hoefling got 28.
Pennsylvania is the only large-population state that doesn’t have a procedure for a write-in candidate to file a declaration of candidacy. If Pennsylvania did have such a law, the decision on which write-ins to tally wouldn’t be so arbitrary. It seems arbitrary for the state to have tallied write-ins for Tom Hoefling, and not Rocky Anderson or Roseanne Barr, two candidates who probably received more than 28 write-ins. Thanks to Rhodes Cook for the information on the state tally.
Rhode Island SB 44, the bill to abolish the straight-ticket device, has a hearing on the afternoon of April 2 in the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee. Here is a short news story about the bill.
The Denver Post has this story about last week’s decision in Independent Institute v Gessler, which invalidated Colorado’s ban on paying petitioners on a per-signature basis. Thanks to Mike Seebeck and Jill Pyeatt for the link.
New York state has a unique law, which gives political party officials the power to determine if a non-member of the party should be permitted to run in that party’s primary. New York State Senator Malcolm Smith, a Democrat, is running for Mayor this year, and he allegedly bribed some individuals to help him get permission to run in the Republican primary. See this story and this story. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the first link, and Christopher Cole for the second link.
