The ballot-qualified Moderate Party of Rhode Island has announced that it will fill most, if not all, of the statewide state ticket. See this story. Thanks to Nancy Hanks for the link. The Moderate Party is also hoping to get a bill introduced in the 2010 legislature to ease the petition requirement. The party’s bill last year, to lower the number of signatures from 5% of the last gubernatorial vote, to a flat 10,000 signatures, passed the Senate but not the House.
According to this news story in the Arizona Daily Star, Republican Party leaders in the state have already decided to try to change the rules, so as to make it possible for the party to exclude independent voters from voting in Republican Party primaries.
On February 5, Colorado Representative Kathleen Curry introduced HB 1271, which relaxes the prior affiliation rules for all candidates. Current Colorado law says no one may be a petitioning candidate in the November election if that person was a member of a qualified party, for even one day, at any time during the 17 months before the general election. Current law also gives political parties the freedom to set their own prior disaffiliation period. But current law says that for qualified political parties that don’t have their own special bylaw on the subject, no one can be the nominee of a party if that person was a member of any other party one year before filing for a party primary.
HB 1271 eases all those deadlines, and makes them only apply to a candidate’s prior registration going back to January 1 of the election year. That would still give Colorado the second most restrictive law on that subject, for independent candidates, of any state. If the bill passes, only California would have a more severe period. The bill does not take effect until 2012. It has already had a hearing, in the House Judiciary Committee, on February 18. The Committee will vote on Monday, February 22.
Ohio has six ballot-qualified parties this year, all of whom have their own primary. The Columbus Dispatch says that one candidate for U.S. Senate filed in the primaries of each of these three qualified minor parties: Constitution (Eric W. Deaton), Libertarian (Steve Linnabary), and Socialist (Daniel LaBotz). See this story. Each candidate needed 500 signatures in order to obtain a place on his own party’s primary ballot. Any registered voter was free to sign.
Although no one filed for U.S. Senate in the Green Party primary, it is known that Dennis Spisak filed in that party’s primary for Governor.
Back on June 17, 2009, the Florida Supreme Court issued an order, striking down Florida laws and regulations that let initiative signers remove their names from the petition after they have signed it. The Court did not then explain its reasoning. On February 18, 2010, the Court issued a lengthy opinion in the same case, explaining the basis for its earlier action. Here is the opinion, which is Browning v Florida Hometown Democracy, SC08-884. The vote was 4-2, with one justice not participating. The decision is 39 pages and the dissent is 26 pages.
The law might have withstood constitutional scrutiny if it had been more even-handed. But, it seemed to give opponents of an initiative the ability to keep any initiative off the ballot. This is because it provided that voters could revoke their signatures as late as the date on which the petition was due. Consequently, it would be impossible for initiative proponents to ever know for sure how many signatures they had, because the proponents could not know how many people were revoking their signatures. Also, the law was not symmetrical, because although it let signers remove their names, it did not let signers who had revoked their signatures change their mind again. The law said if anyone revoked his or her signature, that voter could not sign the petition again, and could not even sign a similar initiative in the future.
Page 30 of the decision says, “Placing a signature upon an initiative petition does not signify one’s definitive agreement with a proposed amendment or revision; rather, one is merely agreeing that the proposal is worthy of statewide consideration and discourse for a vote at a later date. If an elector simply changes his or her mind, he or she remains free to participate in public discussion and to vote against the proposal.”
