On March 6, the Maine Joint Taxation Committee will hold a work session on LD 1826, a bill to abolish Maine’s state income tax check-off that lets taxpayers choose to send a small donation to a political party. The Maine Green Party gets approximately half its funding from the state income tax check-off system.
A similar bill in Utah, HB 50, passed the House in January but has not made any headway since then. The Utah legislature adjourns for the year at the end of this week.
On March 2, the Virginia Senate passed HB 1151, which says that petitions for President and both houses of Congress should use the old 2001-2010 U.S. House district boundaries. President and U.S. Senate petitions are affected by U.S. House district boundaries because statewide petitions have a distribution requirement (400 signatures per U.S. House district are needed). Also presidential petitions must list presidential elector candidates and there must be one presidential elector residing in each U.S. House district.
On January 25, the New Hampshire Senate passed SB 232, which moves the non-presidential primary two weeks earlier, from September 11 to August 28. It also automatically moves the petition deadlines for independent candidates, and newly-qualifying parties, from late August to early August. If the bill passes this year, it takes effect 60 days after passage.
The bill would also automatically move the deadline for independent candidates, including presidential candidates, to file a declaration of candidacy, from the Friday after the first Wednesday in June, to the Friday after the third Wednesday in May. Already New Hampshire’s unique requirement that independent presidential candidates must file a declaration of candidacy in June (before the petition itself is due) was constitutionally suspect. This bill would make the problem worse for unqualified parties that don’t choose their presidential nominee until a month later than May.
However, it is believed that if the bill passes the House, it will be vetoed. Neither the Governor nor the Secretary of State feel the primary should be moved from September to August.
The New Hampshire legislature is also considering HB 1595, which makes the state’s primaries somewhat more closed to independent voters. If an independent voter chooses to vote in a party primary, he or she would still be able to do that, but would be deemed to be a member of that party for at least three months after the primary, and could only switch back to being an independent by filling out a new voter registration application.
Arizona State Senator Steve Gallardo, a Democrat, has introduced S1429, to abolish the presidential primary. So far it has not made any headway.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has this story about the hearing in the case over whether Pennsylvania Congressman Jason Altmire has enough valid signatures to be on the Pennsylvania April 2012 primary ballot. Altmire is running for re-election, but his petition was challenged by another Democratic Congressman, Mark Critz. Both must run against each other in the primary in order to be re-elected. Pennsylvania won’t let circulators work outside their home district. The residency of one of Altmire’s circulators is contested, as the story explains. Nothing in the story hints that Altmire’s attorneys also argued that the residency requirement for circulators is unconstitutional, even though a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania in 2002 ruled that the in-district residency requirement for circulators is unconstitutional as applied to independent candidate petitions. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
