A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on HR 3335 on Tuesday, March 16, at 2 p.m., in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building. HR 3335 permits any legally competent adult U.S. citizen to vote in federal elections, unless the person is incarcerated.

The bill would have the effect of letting almost 4,000,000 people register to vote, who cannot now register to vote, to to laws in certain states that bar ex-felons from registering.

Witnesses will be: (1) Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity; (2) Andres Idarraga (who is in his last year at Yale Law School, but who is not permitted to register to vote even though he is a U.S. citizen); (3) Burt Neuborne of the Brennan Center for Justice; (4) Ion Sancho, Supervisor of Elections of Leon County, Florida; (5) Hilary Shelton of the NAACP; (6) Hans von Spakovsky, a former Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission; (7) Carl Wicklund of the American Probation and Parole Association.

On March 15, Lynne Williams announced that her petition drive to get on the Green Party’s primary ballot for Governor will not succeed. See this story. Although the Green Party is ballot-qualified in Maine, it still has ballot access problems. That is because Maine is one of three states that makes it very difficult for members of a small ballot-qualified party to get on their own party’s primary ballot.

Maine requires 2,000 signatures for a candidate to get on a primary ballot for statewide office. The law does not take into consideration the number of registrants in that party. So, Republicans need 2,000 signatures but can get those signatures from the 258,147 registered Republicans. Democrats need 2,000 signatures but can get them from the 310,950 registered Democrats. Greens need 2,000 signatures but can only get them from the 27,354 registered Greens (these registration totals are from November 2008).

Generally, states that require signatures for a candidate to get on a primary ballot, and which require that the candidate can only get signatures from members of his or her party, at least are rational enough to make the requirement either very easy, or a percentage of the number of eligible signers. The Maine law could probably be overturned in court, if the Maine Green Party were to sue. Storer v Brown, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1974, said that ballot access requirements are unconstitutional if they require the signatures of substantially more than 5% of the eligible signers.

Fortunately for the Maine Green Party, the law on how a party retains its spot on the ballot no longer requires a party to poll any particular share of the vote in November. Instead, a party retains its status if it has at least 10,000 registered members who actually vote in November (it doesn’t matter whom they vote for, just that they show up at the polls and cast a ballot).

It would theoretically be possible for Lynne Williams to be the Green Party nominee for Governor if she were to poll at least 4,000 write-ins at the June 10 Green Party primary. However, Williams is not interested in pursuing that path. The party will concentrate on campaigning for its legislative nominees.