Leadership of the Idaho Republican Party will decide on July 16 whether to institute a caucus for 2012 instead of using the May presidential primary. See this story. Although the party does not have the power to eliminate the presidential primary, the party does have the authority to say that the Republican presidential primary will be a “beauty contest” and that the caucus will choose the delegates to the national convention.
On July 1, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed HB 194. This is an omnibus election law bill that, among other things, purports to give Ohio a ballot access law for minor parties that complies with the 2006 decision of the 6th circuit in Libertarian Party of Ohio v Blackwell. It sets a petition deadline of early February, the same deadline that was held unconstitutional in Williams v Rhodes by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. The Supreme Court said an early February deadline is “unreasonably early.” However, it is true that the new Ohio deadline is better than the old one of November of the year before the election.
The next step will be for the Secretary of State to decide whether the four minor parties that were ballot-qualified in 2008 and 2010 (Constitution, Green, Libertarian and Socialist) may remain on the 2012 ballot. Former Secretary of State Ted Brown, in analogous circumstances, left parties on the ballot in 1970 and 1972.
Alan Abramowitz has this article analyzing independent voters, at the web page for the Center for Politics. Thanks to Taegan Goddard for the link.
Americans Elect posts its national signature total (on ballot access petitions for itself) weekly. The total posted on July 6 is 1,501,174, which is an increase of slightly more than 70,000 since June 30. It is believed all the new signatures are from California.
California county election officials tried very hard recently to eliminate county central committee elections. These party office elections are expensive for county elections officials to administer. These party officer elections use closed primaries, so election administrators must supplement the top-two primary ballots for Congress and state office with closed primary ballots for party office.
SB 441 briefly had been amended to abolish county central committee elections, and then it was amended again to make them voluntary, but the bill has been amended yet again to leave the party central committee elections intact. Ironically, the top-two state constitutional amendment, Prop. 14, passed by the voters in June 2010, adds a provision to the State Constitution saying the legislature shall provide for county central committee elections. Previously, those offices had not been mentioned in the State Constitution. The amendment to SB 441 curtailing the elections tried to get around this constitutional provision by having the legislature tell the parties to provide for these elections. However, if that interpratation were adopted, it would probably be unconstitutional under a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court opinion Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, which said state cannot tell parties how to be organized. Thanks to C. T. Weber for this news.
