On January 19, the Arizona State Senate Judiciary Committee passed SCR 1009, which would provide that the state’s public funding program for candidates for state office would no longer be funded. See this story.
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On January 19, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a brief, unsigned opinion, dismissing the Green Party’s challenge to the oath that candidates must sign before they run in a major party primary. The mandatory oath is one reason the Green Party’s candidate for the State House in 2008, Eugene Platt, could not be on the November 2008 ballot. Platt had first obtained the Green Party nomination. Then he had run in the Democratic Party primary. To get on the ballot in the Democratic Party primary, he had to sign an ambiguously-worded oath that the party says barred him from running in November as the Green Party nominee.
The Supreme Court says its own opinion has no precedential value and will not be published. It avoided the issue that the Green Party had argued in that court, namely, that loyalty oaths are unconstitutional for candidates. The Supreme Court said since the party had not made that argument in the lower state court, it can’t raise it now.
Two federal cases on this issue in South Carolina are still pending. One challenges the election law that says that someone who tries to get the nomination of two parties, and fails to get either one, cannot then be the nominee of the other party. The other case asks whether South Carolina should have obtained U.S. Justice Department approval, under the Voting Rights Act, before it changed its rules on whether candidates seeking a party nomination must file a declaration of candidacy for each separate party. At one point only one declaration of candidacy was good enough, but later the state changed the rule and said a separate declaration of candidacy is needed for each party. But the state didn’t clear this change with the Voting Rights Section of the U.S. Justice Department. Thanks to Scott West for this news.
In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court said in Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut that if a party wants to let independents vote in its primary, it may do so. South Dakota, like most states, changed its law to permit qualified parties to make that decision.
Last year, the Democratic Party decided to let independents vote in its primary. A new bill, HB 1054, has just been introduced in the South Dakota legislature, to help implement the change. Under existing law, there is no problem for primary voters at the polls. If they are registered independents, they tell the election officials in that precinct to give them a Democratic Party primary ballot. HB 1054 handles the problem of how to facilitate this process for absentee voters. See this story.
Alaska Representative Max Gruenberg (D-Anchorage) has introduced HB 288, which would make it easier for a minor party to gain recognition as a qualified party. It changes the number of registered voters a party needs to be recognized from 3% of the last vote cast (currently over 9,000 registered members) to a flat 2,500 registered members. Thanks to Scott Kohlhaas for this news.
Currently, the Alaskan Independence Party, and the Libertarian Party, are the only ballot-qualified parties other than the Democratic and Republican Parties. If the bill were to pass, the Green Party would be back on the ballot.
The Texas Green Party will make a substantial effort to get itself on the Texas ballot this year, according to this story. Only once has the Texas Green Party successfully completed the Texas petition, in 2000. The party polled enough votes in 2000 so that it was automatically also on the ballot in 2002.