On February 7, a subcommittee of the Virginia House Privileges and Elections Committee unanimously passed HB 1151. It says that petitions for U.S. Senate and U.S. House may circulate using the old U.S. House districts, if the new districts aren’t settled by January 1 of the election year. The bill has an urgency clause so it can go into effect immediately on being signed. It covers primary petitions and general election petitions.
U.S. Senate petitions are affected because Virginia requires 400 signatures from each U.S. House district on any statewide petition.
The bill ought to include the same solution for presidential petitions, but it doesn’t. No one in the Virginia legislature seems to know or care that minor party and independent candidates for President are unable to circulate now, because the petitions must include one candidate for presidential elector from each U.S. House district. Also presidential petitions have the same 400-signature requirement from each district. It would be eminently sensible to expand HB 1151 to cover presidential petitions, but that idea has been suggested to the sponsor and he has declined to amend his bill to fix the presidential petition problem. Virginia activists ought to be publicizing this problem. Virginia law lets presidential petitions include a stand-in presidential candidate, and says presidential petitions may state to circulate on January 1. Clearly, the intent of the law is to permit presidential petitioning right now, yet in reality such petitioning is impossible because of the U.S. House district boundary problem.