Oklahoma State Senator Rob Johnson (R-Kingfisher) has introduced SB 668, which does not improve ballot access for newly-qualifying parties in presidential election years, but which does improve it in midterm years. The bill retains the 5% figure for calculating the number of signatures, but it changes the base from the last vote cast, to the last vote cast in a midterm year. If this bill were in effect now, the 2014 requirement would be 51,739 instead of the actual requirement of 66,744.

In 2011, the Oklahoma House had passed HB 1058, which lowered the number of signatures to exactly 22,500. But the Senate in 2012 had amended it to 5% of the last midterm vote cast, exactly what the new 2013 bill does. In the last session, the two houses never held a conference committee to straighten out the two versions of the bill, so nothing passed.

Senator Johnson is the Vice-Chair of the Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee. In the last session he was the Chair of the Senate Rules Committee. Also in the last session, he was the lead sponsor of the National Popular Vote Plan bill, which didn’t pass in Oklahoma.

None of these bills makes any change at all to the March 1 petition deadline. Oklahoma legislators seem never to notice that there have been 51 constitutional ballot access cases in which petition deadlines that early for newly-qualifying parties or independent candidates have been struck down. There are no precedents in any state upholding such an early deadline. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.

The most powerful backers of the top-two system in California consistently argued that if California passed the top-two voter measure in June 2010, the type of Republicans elected would change, from “extremists” to “moderates.” These backers included the Chamber of Commerce, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and almost all of the state’s largest newspapers.

On the evening of January 15, the U.S. House voted on whether to increase the Hurricane Sandy relief fund from $17 billion to $50 billion. The Senate had already passed the $50 billion figure, which included $20 billion to repair bridges and roads, $4 for the Army Corps of Engineers, and $6.5 billion for the disaster relief fund. The roll call vote on increasing the bill to $50 billion passed narrowly, with virtual unanimous Democratic support, and the votes of some Republicans. Among the Republicans in the House, the vote on this amendment, the Freylinghuysen amendment, was 38 “yes”; 190 “no”; and 4 not voting.

Among the 24 Republicans in the House from top-two states, the vote was 4 “yes”; 19 “no”; and one not voting. For the entire roll call, see here. The ratio of “yes” votes to “no” votes for Republicans from the top-two states was virtually identical to the ratio of “yes” and “no” votes for all Republicans in the House.

Nothing in this blog post should be taken as expressing any opinion on whether the Freylinghuysen is good public policy or bad public policy. Nor should anything in this blog post be taken to indicate agreement with the terms “extremist” or “moderate” as applied to members of Congress. The purpose of this post is to rebut the idea, pushed by so many influential Californians in 2010, that the top-two system was a magic device to change the behavior of California’s politicians. Only one of the fifteen California Republican U.S. House members, Jeff Denham, voted for the Freylinghuysen amendment.

On January 15, a New Hampshire House Committee heard testimony for and against a bill to restore straight-ticket voting. See this account of the hearing. The story does not mention any witness who raise the point that if enacted, the bill would only give a straight-ticket device to parties that had polled 4% for Governor or U.S. Senator in the last election, and would not give a straight-ticket device to groups that had completed the party petition.