Nebraska State Senator Paul Schumacher (R-Columbus) has again introduced a bill to permit voters to sign petitions on-line. His bill, LB 160, only applies to initiative, referendum and recall petitions. He introduced the same bill in the last session, but it didn’t pass. There was also a bill in the session before that to do the same thing, but it didn’t pass either.
On January 18, the remaining uncounted votes in New York’s 46th State Senate district were counted. Whereas the original count had found a narrow victory for George Amedore, the Republican-Conservative-Independence nominee, now that the remaining ballots have been counted, there is an even narrower victory for the Democratic-Working Families nominee, Cecilia Tkaczyk. See this story.
The reason there were approximately 100 uncounted ballots until this month is that, due to election official error, those ballots had originally been determined invalid. However, last week New York state courts ruled that the ballots were valid and should be counted.
Oklahoma State Representative Jeffrey Hickman has introduced HB 2134, which lowers the number of signatures for a newly-qualifying party from 5% of the last vote cast to exactly 5,000 signatures. Hickman has served in the legislature starting in 2004, and in the last session of the legislature was Speaker Pro Tempore. He is a Republican from Alva. Thanks to E. Zachary Knight for this news.
No winner has yet been determined in the New York State Senate race, 46th district. See this story, which says that only 8 previously uncounted ballots were examined on Thursday, January 17 (today). But another 91 ballots will probably be counted on Friday, January 18.
The South Dakota Secretary of State’s omnibus bill, HB 1018, would allow a ballot-qualified party to tell the Secretary of State that it no longer wishes to be ballot-qualified. The national chair and the state chair would both be required to sign paperwork, ending the party’s qualified status. The bill seems faulty because it is entirely possible that a party ballot-qualified in South Dakota might not have a national chair, or any national officers. There are many ballot-qualified parties in the United States that are not part of a national party organization. Such parties exist currently in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Vermont.
Americans Elect is a ballot-qualified party in South Dakota currently, because it successfully petitioned in 2011, and in South Dakota, once a party petitions, it remains on the ballot until it has gone through a gubernatorial election and failed to poll 2.5% of the vote for Governor. South Dakota, like most states, doesn’t elect its Governor in presidential years, so Americans Elect is now ballot-qualified for 2014.
The bill also provides that a candidate cannot notarize his or her own ballot access petition. And it makes it illegal for a group to circulate a petition for party status more than one year before that petition is due.
