On May 16, the South Carolina Senate unanimously passed a bill to provide for a more rational system for candidates to file for primaries. However, the bill would have no effect on this year’s problem. See this story.
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In 2010, the Ohio election law was amended to require all qualified parties to certify the names of their presidential and vice-presidential nominees by 90 days before the general election. In 2012, that would be August 8. However, neither the Democratic Party, nor the Republican Party, will have held their national conventions that early.
The Ohio law is section 3505.10(B). It says the November ballot, in presidential years, will include “the names of the candidates for president and vice-president certified to the secretary of state or nominated in one of the following manners: (1) Nominated by the national convention of a political party to which delegates and alternates were elected in this state at the next preceding primary election. A political party certifying candidates so nominated shall certify the names of those candidates to the secretary of state on or before the 90th day before the day of the general election.”
Texas had a similar problem in 2008. The law required the names to be certified by a date that was earlier than the date of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The Secretary of State did not enforce the deadline in 2008, and in 2009 the Texas legislature repealed the deadline. The Ohio legislature is still in session so it could fix the problem if it wished.
The Tennessee Secretary of State’s brief in the Sixth Circuit is due on June 12, in Green Party of Tennessee v Hargett, 12-5271. The state’s brief will try to persuade the Sixth Circuit to remove the Green Party, and the Constitution Party, from the November 2012 ballot. The U.S. District Court had ordered that they be put on the ballot. The state will probably argue that those two parties have not shown a modicum of voter support.
In the meantime, even though the Constitution Party has filed its candidates with the state, the state’s web page does not include the Constitution Party nominees on the list of candidates. This is having a discouraging effect on the party’s candidates. Their attempts to campaign are injured because they are not found on the Secretary of State’s web page. The Green Party has not yet had its nominating convention.
The U.S. Supreme Court has extended the deadline for Washington state, and the Washington state Grange, to file their responses in the case challenging top-two election systems. The new deadline is June 22. The case is Washington State Democratic Committee v Washington State Grange, numbers 11-1263 and 11-1266. If the state and the Grange had not asked for more time, the briefs would all be in by now and we could have expected the U.S. Supreme Court to decide in June whether to hear the case. But because of the delay, the decision on whether the court hears this case will not be made until September at the earliest, and not revealed to the public until early October.
On May 15, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed SB 295, which repeals the 2011 omnibus election law bill, except for one provision that eliminates early voting on the three days before election day. See this story. As a result of the bill becoming law, the petition deadline for newly-qualifying parties reverts to November of the year before the election (in presidential election years), the same deadline held unconstitutional in 2006 by the Sixth Circuit.