On April 20, the Missouri House Rules Committee passed SB 282. The bill now moves to the House floor. Among many other unrelated changes, it permits an unqualified party to circulate a petition to qualify itself, without the need for that petition to list candidates for president and presidential elector. Of course, this makes it possible for the petition to be circulated before the group has chosen a presidential nominee.
This story suggests that Oklahoma legislators have not yet decided whether to move the non-presidential primary from July to June, or whether to eliminate the runoff primary. The legislature must choose one of these options before it adjourns this year. The existing system cannot survive, because of the federal law that requires foreign absentee ballots to be mailed at least 45 days before an election. Current law has too little time between the primary and the runoff primary.
The legislature will adjourn for the year in mid-May or late May. If the legislature moves the non-presidential primary to June, the same bill moves the petition for a new party to March 1, which would be unconstitutionally early.
On April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a stay in the Hamilton County, Ohio election lawsuit over provisional ballots from the November 2, 2010 election. See this order. This means the two candidates for Juvenile County Judge, a Republican and a Democrat, will finally be able to learn who won the election. Thanks to Rick Hasen for this news.
Hamilton County Board of Elections didn’t want to count provisional ballots for certain voters who turned in the ballots to the wrong precinct location on election day, even though the voters were in the right building. There was confusion because there were two precincts voting in the same building. The voters were not at fault, because polling place officials gave them misinformation. Nevertheless, Ohio election law says provisional ballots are invalid if they are not turned in at the right precinct. But the U.S. District Court, and the 6th circuit, said they should be counted anyway, because Hamilton County had counted a different set of provisional ballots that had not been turned in at the correct precinct. The lower courts cited Bush v Gore, which said “Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”
On April 19, the Rutgers University Student Assembly, and several other groups, along with individual voters, filed a lawsuit against the New Jersey law that sets a 21-day advance registration deadline for people to register to vote. The case is Rutgers University Student Assembly v Middlesex County Board of Elections, superior court, Middlesex County. The lawsuit is based on the New Jersey Constitution. It argues that given modern technology, there is no need to close off voter registration as much as three weeks before any election. The complaint suggests that there is no strong state interest not to let voters register on election day. Thanks to Frank Askin for this news.
Kentucky holds elections in November 2011 for all the statewide state executive posts, including Secretary of State. The Democratic and Republican primaries are May 18. Two Republicans are running against each other for the party’s nomination for Secretary of State. Bill Johnson and Hilda Legg debated each other on April 18. Here is a four-minute you tube, in which Michael Lewis, calling in, asked each candidate whether independent voters should be allowed to vote in major party primaries. Johnson said “yes”; Legg said “no.”
Neither candidate is an office-holder currently. Neither candidate mentioned that if the Republican Party wants to invite independents into its primary, it need not wait for the legislature to authorize a bill on that subject. Political parties with their own primary have a constitutional right to invite independents to vote into their primary, regardless of state law, as a result of the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut.
