On February 7, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said these presidential candidates will be on presidential primary ballots: the Democratic Party ballot will only contain President Obama’s name; the Republican Party ballot will list Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum; and the Libertarian Party ballot will list Roger Gary, R. J. Harris, Gary Johnson, Carl Person, Bill Still, and Lee Wrights.

North Carolina’s Board of Elections asks the party leadership to tell them which names to list. The party leaders are supposed to choose candidates who are discussed in the media. Any candidate not chosen by the party leadership can still run, but he or she needs 10,000 signatures of party members.

This will be the first time North Carolina has ever held a presidential primary for a party other than the Democratic and Republican Parties. Thanks to Brian Irving for this news.

On February 6, the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee passed SCR 1021 by a vote of 6-2. If the legislature passes the bill, then the voters will be asked in November 2012 whether they wish to cut off funds for the state’s program for public funding for candidates for state office.

On February 7, a subcommittee of the Virginia House Privileges and Elections Committee unanimously passed HB 1151. It says that petitions for U.S. Senate and U.S. House may circulate using the old U.S. House districts, if the new districts aren’t settled by January 1 of the election year. The bill has an urgency clause so it can go into effect immediately on being signed. It covers primary petitions and general election petitions.

U.S. Senate petitions are affected because Virginia requires 400 signatures from each U.S. House district on any statewide petition.

The bill ought to include the same solution for presidential petitions, but it doesn’t. No one in the Virginia legislature seems to know or care that minor party and independent candidates for President are unable to circulate now, because the petitions must include one candidate for presidential elector from each U.S. House district. Also presidential petitions have the same 400-signature requirement from each district. It would be eminently sensible to expand HB 1151 to cover presidential petitions, but that idea has been suggested to the sponsor and he has declined to amend his bill to fix the presidential petition problem. Virginia activists ought to be publicizing this problem. Virginia law lets presidential petitions include a stand-in presidential candidate, and says presidential petitions may state to circulate on January 1. Clearly, the intent of the law is to permit presidential petitioning right now, yet in reality such petitioning is impossible because of the U.S. House district boundary problem.