The 7th circuit will hear Stone v Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago, on April 4, Monday, at 9:30 a.m, in courtroom 2721. The 7th circuit courthouse is at 219 South Dearborn Street. The issue is whether requiring 12,500 signatures for candidates for citywide office is too severe, especially given that voters can only sign one petition for each office. Chicago has non-partisan elections and ballot access is the same for all candidates for citywide office.
The Texas House Elections Committee will hold a hearing on HB 418 on March 7, Monday. This is the bill that imposes filing fees on candidates who get on the ballot by petition, or by convention. Currently, only candidates running in a partisan primary pay filing fees. No party other than the Democratic or Republican Parties has ever had a primary that was paid for by Texas taxpayers, except for La Raza Unida in the 1970’s.
The purpose of the filing fees in primaries is to prevent the primary ballot from being too crowded. No one needs a petition to get on a partisan primary ballot, so the fees are the only protection against overly-crowded primary ballots. That rationale for the fees does not apply to the general election. Parties that nominate by convention (such as the Libertarian and Green Parties) pay for their own conventions, and there is no concern about crowded ballots at a convention. The general election ballot is never crowded in Texas because ballot access for independent candidates and new political parties is so difficult. When the Green Party qualified in Texas in 2010, the petition to get it on the ballot cost over $500,000.
Texas does occasionally have crowded ballots in special elections, because in special elections, no one needs a petition to get on the ballot. The sponsor of HB 418 is Leo Berman (R-Tyler).
On March 2, a U.S. District Court in Idaho ruled that the Republican Party may prevent people who don’t consider themselves Republican Party members from voting in the Republican primary. See this story. The case is Idaho Republican Party v Ysursa, 08-cv-165. Here is the 20-page decision.
UPDATE: here is some commentary about the decision on Daily Kos.
On March 2, the North Carolina House Election Law and Campaign Finance Reform Committee held an informal hearing on ballot access. The consensus seemed to be that the committee members will write a substitute for HB 32, which will probably require the signatures of either one-fourth of 1%, or one-half of 1%, of the electorate, for new parties and independent candidates to get on the ballot. It is not clear what the base for the signatures will be. If the bill emerges as one-half of 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, that would be 21,345 signatures. The current requirement for 2012 is 85,379 signatures. Thanks to Jordon Greene for this news.
On March 2, the Arizona Senate Government Reform Committee passed HB 2335. The bill says that vice-presidential nominees should have their names on the November ballot. Currently, Arizona and North Dakota are the only states that don’t print the names of vice-presidential nominees on the ballot.
HB 2335 started out as a bill to delete the names of candidates for presidential elector from the November ballot. Arizona has eleven electoral votes starting in 2012, and if there are six slates on the ballot, for example, that involves printing the names of 66 candidates for presidential elector on the ballot. That takes up a lot of room, and most people would probably think the voters don’t care who the presidential elector candidates are. But, after the bill was introduced, it was amended to leave the presidential elector candidates’ names on the ballot.
