The Rio Grande Sun of Espanola, New Mexico, has this story about the reasons why the State Elections Director recently resigned his position, including the Director’s assertion that the Secretary of State pressured employees of the office to each obtain 1,000 signatures on her petition to get on the primary ballot.
Guilford County Commissioner Bruce Davis says he will attempt to qualify as an independent candidate for North Carolina State Senate. See this story. Guilford County is North Carolina’s third most populous county, and includes Greensboro.
Davis needs a petition signed by 4% of the registered voters of his district. The story says he needs 5,000 signatures, but does not say if this is the legal requirement, or the number that he realistically needs to collect. If he gets on the ballot and wins, he will be the first person elected to the North Carolina Senate, who was not a Democratic or Republican Party nominee, since 1900, when the Peoples Party elected three Senators.
Although California’s Proposition 14 increases the ballot qualification rules for parties to be ballot-qualified, no California newspaper story had yet mentioned that characteristic, until this San Francisco Chronicle story of March 10. It appears on page one.
Proposition 62, the earlier California top-two open primary measure from 2004, did not increase the difficulty for a party to remain ballot-qualified. To compensate for effectively eliminating the 2% vote test (which, under current law, is the easiest method by which parties remain ballot-qualified), Proposition 62 in 2004 lowered the registration test from 1% of the last gubernatorial vote, to one-third of 1%. That way, no qualified party would have lost its qualified status if Proposition 62 had passed.
The backers of Prop. 14 were free to have taken that step as well, but they chose not to do that. The quote in the story represents the first time any backer of Prop. 14 has been confronted with the question of why they are making it more difficult for parties to remain ballot-qualified. As anyone who reads the story can see, the backers breezily said, in response, “They’ll just need to keep their numbers up.”
Back in 1981, the California legislature was threatening to pass a bill to raise the registration requirements for a party to remain ballot-qualified. The bill failed to pass after 40 newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations editorially condemned the bill. Ironically, Proposition 14 is more severe than the 1981 bill, which required one-half of 1% of the total number of registered voters. Proposition 14 raises it, in effect, to 1% of the last gubernatorial vote.
The Sacramento Bee of March 11 has this story, pointing out that opponents of Proposition 14 are so far not spending any money against it.
The Los Angeles Times has this story, by its Sacramento correspondent George Skelton, that is a model of fairness and clarity compared to earlier stories and editorials today in the Sacramento Bee and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. However, even this story fails to mention that Proposition 14 also makes it more difficult for ballot-qualified parties to remain qualified.
Three states with September primaries have recently moved their primaries to August, or are about to do so. Wisconsin, another state with a September primary (for office other than President) intends to keep its September primary, at least this year. It will request a waiver from the federal government. See this story.
A new federal law requires states to mail out foreign absentee ballots at least 45 days before any election. It is difficult for states to comply with this federal law if they keep a September primary.
