On April 8, the Hawaii Senate passed HB 638 on second reading. Third reading will be early next week. The bill had had already passed the House. It provides for Instant Runoff Voting in special elections.
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The 8th Circuit will hold oral arguments in Libertarian Party of North Dakota v Jaeger on Wednesday, May 11, in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is the case that challenges the North Dakota law that says no party can nominate any candidates in its primary, for state legislature, unless between 10% and 15% of all the voters who turn out to vote in the primaries choose that particular party’s primary ballot. The law specifically requires 1% of the population (including children and aliens), but turnout is so low in North Dakota primaries, especially in midterm years, that 1% of the population works out to between 10% and 15% of the voters who actually vote.
The law is so stringent, no minor party candidate for the legislature has appeared on the November ballot since 1976. Nevertheless, the U.S. District Court upheld the law last year, after refusing to hold oral arguments, and issuing a ruling the very day after the last brief had been filed.
North Dakota is the only state remaining that has a minimum vote requirement for candidates in partisan primaries, except that Hawaii imposes a primary vote test as well; but the Hawaii vote test only applies to independent candidates, not party candidates.
On April 8, Ralph Nader’s attorneys filed this 34-page brief in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, in Nader v Maine Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee, et al. This is Nader’s lawsuit, suing the Democratic Party for its actions to keep him off ballots in the 2004 presidential election. The lower court in Maine had not ruled on the substance of the lawsuit, but had found procedural reasons for not permitting a trial.
On April 6, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee amended SB 100 and passed the bill. As amended, the primary would continue to be in the first week in March. But the run-off primary moves from the 2nd Tuesday in April, to the 4th Tuesday in May.
If the bill passes in that form, in 2012, the petition deadline to put a new or minor party on the ballot would remain unchanged, and would be May 20. But the run-off primary would not be until May 22. Texas is the only state that does not permit primary voters to sign a petition for a new or minor party. But, under the literal language of the law, if SB 100 passes in its existing form, a voter could sign for a party petition and still vote in a run-off primary, and the signature would count.
Most Texas legislators have a rigid conviction that it would be bad public policy to permit a voter to sign a ballot access petition for a new or minor party and still participate in the primary of a major party. However, this bill breaches that way of thinking.
Last month, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party each submitted a petition to be on the Maryland ballot in 2012 and 2014. The law requires 10,000 valid signatures. Both petitions were recently found insufficient by the State Board of Elections. However, the Board has agreed not to automatically convert all the registered members of those parties to independent voters.
The two parties are planning to file a lawsuit in state court very soon, over the standards for checking signature validity. The Board used a standard that rejects all signatures if the form of the name on the petition is not an exact match for the name on the voter registration records. For example, if a signer uses a middle initial, but that middle initial does not appear on the voter registration record (or vice versa), the signature is invalid.
It is likely that the lawsuit will win. Recently, the State Appeals Court (the highest state court in Maryland) ruled that signatures that are illegible are valid, assuming the printed name and address match the voter registration record. The same logic that won that case should apply to the parallel issue involved in the new lawsuit.