The Maine bill that would provide for Ranked-Choice Voting for statewide races, both federal and state, is now introduced and is LD 518. Thanks to Rob Richie for this news.
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On March 1, the Idaho Senate State Affairs Committee heard testimony on SB 1108, which makes it more difficult for statewide initiatives to get on the ballot. Current law requires a petition signed by 6% of the registered voters. The bill would say the petition must also include 6% of the registered voters in at least half of the state’s legislative districts. See this story about the testimony opposing the bill; also see this story. The committee postponed a vote on the bill. The Farm Bureau supports making it more difficult for initiatives because it is afraid that there will otherwise soon be initiatives on regulating treatment of farm animals.
Philadelphia Weekly, the city’s leading free weekly newspaper, has this story about the ballot access bill pending in the Pennsylvania legislature.
The Wyoming Constitution Party will try to collect 37,606 valid signatures on a referendum petition. The signatures are due May 28. No referendum petition has succeeded in Wyoming since 1996. The party opposes a bill that weakened the power of the state’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction. See this story. If the party succeeds with the petition, then the law is suspended until the voters vote on it.
On February 27, U.S. District Court Judge Philip A. Brimmer, a Bush Jr. appointee, upheld Colorado law that lets individuals give twice as much money to the campaign of a candidate who is nominated in a primary, versus a candidate who is nominated in a minor party convention or by independent petition. Riddle v Hickenlooper, 1:10-cv-1857. Here is the 33-page decision.
The decision says that it is rational to let individuals give $400 to a legislative candidate who runs in a primary, and to restrict individuals from giving more than $200 to a legislative candidate who gets on the November ballot via a minor party nominating convention or via an independent candidate petition, because candidates who must run in a primary are expected to have more campaign expenses. The opinion acknowledges that in recent years, only 11% of legislative candidates who participated in a primary had a primary opponent. But, the opinion says even primary candidates who have no opponent often spend money in primary season “to clear the field of potential challengers, to spend money on campaign literature, to secure volunteers, and to purchase web domains.”
The irony is that this case was fild by Kathleen Curry, who had to run as a write-in candidate in 2010 (the year the case was filed), and running a successful write-in campaign is more expensive than running when one is on the ballot. Successful write-in candidates usually must send direct mail to every voter in the district, if they can afford it; they also do things like distributing literature at the polls, outside the “no politics zone” and that is very expensive also. Plaintiffs will appeal. Curry, an incumbent, was forced to be a write-in candidate because she had changed partisan affilation (from Democratic to independent) in October 2009 and the law barred candidates from qualifying as independents if they had been a member of a party during the year before qualifying. That law has since been relaxed.