On March 19, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour signed SB 3058. It sets a 5 p.m. deadline for presidential elector paperwork. The old law set the deadline date, but not an hour. This bill only came into existence because of the 2008 incident at which the Secretary of State’s office rejected the paperwork for Brian Moore, Socialist Party presidential candidate. Thanks to Brian Moore for this news.
This article says former North Carolina legislator Cary Allred will be a write-in candidate this year for County Commission in Alamance County. Allred is now a registered independent.
The 9th circuit will hear McComish v Brewer, 10-15166, on April 12, probably in San Francisco. This is the case over certain aspects of Arizona’s public funding law for candidates. The lawsuit challenges the part of the program that provides extra public funding for candidates who have a privately-funded opponent with a great deal of funding.
The U.S. District Court had ruled that part of the public funding law to be invalid. The U.S. District Court had also said that the unconstitutional parts can’t be separated out from the remainder of the program. A majority of Arizona legislators are hostile to the program, so they are not likely to pass any bill repairing the system. This is somewhat different from the situation in Connecticut. In Connecticut, a majority of legislators favor the public funding, so the Connecticut legislature will probably repair the parts that have so far been held unconstitutional.
The New Mexico Libertarian Party believes it has finished its petition to get back on the ballot. 7,500 signatures have been collected, to meet a requirement of 4,151. Assuming the petition is approved, the party will be ballot-qualified in 2010 and 2012. However, another New Mexico election law says that even though the party would be ballot-qualified, it still needs more petitions for all of its nominees, except for the presidential nominee. Those candidate petitions are due in the summer.
On March 17, the Connecticut Joint Government & Elections Committee passed HB 5021, the bill to amend parts of the public funding law for campaigns for state office. HB 5021 deletes the parts of the law that require petitions from all independent candidates and most minor party candidates. Under HB 5021, the rules would be the same for all candidates, regardless of party affiliation or lack of party affiliation.
HB 5021 is the Governor’s bill, and the legislative sponsor is Representative Lawrence G. Miller (R-Stratford). See this story.
The committee did not advance HB 5022, an alternate bill which retains the discriminatory features but makes them less extreme.
