The March 23 issue of the Hartford Courant has this article about the legislature’s plans for changing the state’s public funding law. Although the Joint Government Administration and Elections Committee passed bills six days ago that remove the discriminatory parts of the law, those bills haven’t yet received a vote on the floor of either house. Thanks to Eric Brown’s Political Activity Law for the link.
The March 23 issue of the Hartford Courant has this article about the legislature’s plans for changing the state’s public funding law. Although the Joint Government Administration and Elections Committee passed bills six days ago that remove the discriminatory parts of the law, those bills haven’t yet received a vote on the floor of either house. Thanks to Eric Brown’s Political Activity Law for the link.
The Prison Policy Institute has published this report, describing in detail how each state government handles the problem of residency for prisoners. The report also explains how the Census Bureau is improving its data collection, so as to be helpful to states that want to treat prisoners as residents of their homes before they were incarcerated, as opposed to treating them as residents of the prison.
This subject has political implications, because of the 1960’s decisions of the Supreme Court that U.S. House districts, and legislative districts, and local government districts, must be approximately equal in population. If a rural county has 10,000 civilian residents, and also hosts several large state prisons that hold 25,000 prisoners, the state must decide whether to treat that county as having either 35,000 residents, or 10,000 residents, for purposes of redistricting. Thanks to Rick Hasen’s ElectionLawBlog for the link.
Pia Varna, the only Republican running for the U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania’s First district, has been removed from the Republican primary ballot because some of her signatures were collected by people who don’t live in the First district. See this story. One must read to the very end of the story to learn the basis for the challenge to her petition. UPDATE: the candidate expects to file a lawsuit soon in federal court, challenging the residency requirement for circulators of primary petitions.
However, in 2002, a federal court struck down Pennsylvania’s residency requirement for petition circulators for candidates. That decision, Morrill v Weaver, 224 F.Supp. 2d 882, says, “We believe that precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court and federal Circuit Courts clearly compel us to find that the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution prohibit those portions of sec. 2911(d) which require affiants to be residents of the particular electoral districts in which candidates are running. We declare all such provisions to be unconstitutional and void.”
Pennsylvania has seven ballot access restrictions that have been held unconstitutional, but which the legislature has never amended. The residency requirement for circulators is one such law.
This year, the Illinois Libertarian Party will attempt to complete the very difficult requirement for U.S. House in the 14th district. Libertarian nominee Doug Marks needs 16,743 valid signatures to be assured a place on the ballot. The 14th district stretches across northern Illinois from east to west, and once was represented by former Republican speaker Dennis Hastert.
In 2008, after Hastert retired, the district chose a Democrat, Bill Foster. The vote in 2008 was 185,404 for the Democrat, and 135,653 for the Republican nominee, Jim Oberweis. The Green nominee in 2008, Robert Hill, was removed from the ballot after Democrats challenged the paperwork by which the Greens nominated him. This district is still considered marginal, and it is very likely that Marks’ petition will be challenged.
If the Libertarian Party manages to collect 16,743 valid signatures for Marks, that will set a new petitioning record nationwide for candidate for U.S. House. The most difficult petition requirement that has ever been overcome for that office was 12,919 signatures, collected by independent Frazier Reams in Ohio in 1954.
Many U.S. House nominees of unqualified political parties have managed to be on the ballot in Illinois, but only because Illinois permits anyone to get on the general election ballot with any number of signatures (no matter how tiny) if no one brings a petition challenge against them. For instance, in 1996, Libertarians were on the ballot for ten of the twenty Illinois U.S. House districts, but not because they completed the difficult 5% petitions. Instead, Libertarians in 1996 filed candidates in all the U.S. House districts, and in half of them, no one bothered to challenge the Libertarians, who typically submitted only a dozen or so signatures.
On rare occasions, someone files a challenge in Illinois and then withdraws the challenge. Bill Scheurer, U.S. House nominee of the Moderate Party in Illinois’ 8th district in 2006, appeared on the ballot because a challenge to his petition was withdrawn. Democrats had challenged him, but withdrew the challenge after Scheurer filed his own lawsuit alleging that Democrats had tricked him into hiring a paid petitioning company that secretly plotted to sabotage his petition.
