Russell Mokhiber has this piece, in Counterpunch, criticizing Common Cause for weighing in in favor of discriminatory public funding laws in the Connecticut Green Party case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Thanks to IndependentPoliticalReport for the link.
This article says that recall petitions have been launched against sixteen Wisconsin State Senators, eight Republicans and eight Democrats. The recall petition needs the signatures of 25% of the number of people who voted in November 2010 within that district. The article says that this number ranges from 11,817 signatures in the district which had the fewest voters in 2010, to 20,973 in the district that had the most.
The November 2010 vote in Wisconsin for Governor was 2,158,974. It is estimated that Wisconsin has 4,200,000 people eligible to register to vote. Wisconsin has 33 State Senate districts, so the average district has 127,273 persons who are registered, or who could register. Thanks to Politico for the link.
The Montana House State Administration Committee will hold a hearing on SB 194 on March 8. This is the bill, written by the Commission on Uniform State Laws, to provide that each party, and any independent presidential candidate, must submit twice as many candidates for presidential elector as that state has votes in the electoral college. Half would be designated presidential electors and half would be designated alternate presidential electors. If a presidential elector voted against his or her party’s nominee for President in the electoral college, that elector would be deemed to have resigned and the alternate would vote instead.
The Commission on Uniform State Laws also seems to have succeeded in getting this bill introduced in Indiana, Nebraska, and Washington, although none of the bills in those states have made any headway so far, except that the Nebraska bill has had a hearing. The Washington bill, HB 1950, is dead for this year.
On March 4, the Montana Senate State Administration Committee tabled SB 257, the bill that would have allowed two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate. Thanks to Mike Fellows for this news. The Committee members felt the bill would require some counties to purchase new kinds of vote-counting machines.
On March 5, the Washington House passed HB 1860, which moves elections for Precinct Committee Officers from the general election to the presidential primary. Precinct Committee Officers are officers of the political parties.
The bill makes it likely, but not certain, that Washington state will continue to hold presidential primaries. The bill says a presidential primary will be held if “both” major parties tell the state no later than September 1 that they will choose all their delegates to national conventions via the presidential primary. If either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party insists on choosing some delegates by caucus, then the presidential primary is canceled for all parties.
It is interesting that the bill assumes that there will only be two qualified political parties into the indefinite future in Washington state. This assumption is because the bill refers to “both” the qualified parties. A qualified party in Washington state currently is one that polled at least 5% of the vote for President at the last presidential election.
Washington’s Secretary of State Sam Reed had proposed that the presidential primaries be eliminated, but the bills to do that did not advance.
