Cecil Bothwell, a new member of the Asheville, North Carolina city council, says he is an atheist. The North Carolina Constitution bars atheists from holding public office. Newspapers around the U.S. are covering the issue. Here is a story from Texas (which mentions that the Texas Constitution has a similar provision), and here is one from California.
On December 17, Bill O’Reilly and the two guests on his Fox News TV show discussed ballot access laws, within a larger discussion of whether conservatives should support a third party, the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. Here is the transcript. The two guests were Ned Ryun and Mike Gallagher.
On November 12, New Hampshire State Senator Theodore Gatsas resigned his seat in the New Hampshire Senate, because he had just been elected Mayor of Manchester. Shortly afterwards, the New Hampshire Executive Council said there will be a special election to fill that empty seat on February 16. It said that any independent candidate petitions for that race would be due January 12.
Joseph R. Hoell decided to run in that election with the ballot label “Constitution Party”. He needs 750 valid signatures. The New Hampshire independent petition for State Senate is one of the most difficult in the nation, even in regular elections, when candidates have approximately six months to get their signatures. A typical New Hampshire State Senate district cast about 26,000 votes for President in November 2008, so 750 signatures is about 2.5% of the active electorate. The only states with a higher percentage for that office, for independent candidates, are Georgia, North Carolina, California, Illinois, and North Dakota.
Last year the New Hampshire election code was amended to say that independent candidate petitions may only be circulated in even-numbered years. However, on December 10, the New Hampshire Secretary of State said that law doesn’t apply to special elections, even though the law itself doesn’t specify any exception for special elections. Thanks to Ken Blevins for this news.
On December 18, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Holmes Bell struck down Michigan election law 168.957, which says that circulators of recall petitions must be registered voters who live in the electoral district of the official sought to be recalled. Bogaert v Land, 1:08-cv-687, western district. See this story.
The decision was no surprise, because the same judge had issued an injunction against that same law last year, so that a recall petition against a state legislator would not be found lacking in valid signatures. The recall had enough otherwise valid signatures, except that some of the signatures had been collected by people who didn’t live in the district. Last year, after Judge Bell had granted injunctive relief, the state had appealed to the 6th circuit, but the 6th circuit had said the matter of injunctive relief was moot, because the recall election had already been held by the time the case reached the 6th circuit. Thanks to Bill Hall for the link.
This case is the first one in which a residency requirement for circulators of a recall petition has been invalidated. Michigan had argued that even if residency requirements for initiatives and candidates are unconstitutional, that recall petitions are different. But the ruling says that the same First Amendment principles apply, no matter what kind of petition is being circulated.
Bradley Smith, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, has this op-ed in the December 19 issue of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Smith explains that public funding laws, to be constitutional, must avoid provisions that gives extra funding for publicly-funded candidates, when the publicly funded-candidate has an opponent who is not accepting public funding and who is the beneficiary of large independent expenditures. “Independent expenditures” means some sort of advertising allegedly on behalf of some candidate, but which has not been coordinated with the candidate.
The occasion for Smith’s op-ed is that Wisconsin recently enacted public funding for candidates for judicial office. The Wisconsin law provides for extra public funding, of the type that Smith argues violates the First Amendment. The basis for Smith’s opinion is the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Davis v FEC, the decision that struck down the “millionaire’s amendment” in federal campaign law. That decision didn’t deal directly with public funding. Instead, it struck down part of the McCain-Feingold law that said contribution limits are substantially relaxed when a candidate has an opponent who is spending large amounts of money on his or her own campaign.
