According to this interesting analysis by Fairvote, President Obama has visited all nine swing states since he has been president, but has visited only seven other states. In this context, “swing state” means a state carried by President Bush in 2004, but by Obama in 2008.
On June 25, the Louisiana legislature passed HB 420, the omnibus election law bill that, among other things, extends the independent presidential paperwork deadline by three days, and clarifies the deadline for the presidential elector paperwork of qualified parties. The part of the bill that requires candidates to certify that they have filed their federal and state income taxes was deleted from the bill by the conference committee earlier.
On June 25, the Arizona House Judiciary Committee passed three election law bills of interest.
SB 1091 is the Secretary of State’s omnibus election law bill. It passed unanimously. It moves the independent presidential petition deadline from June to September, and says that out-of-state circulators can work on an independent presidential petition, but not any other kind of petition.
SCR 1025 provides that the voters will say in November 2010 whether they want to abolish public funding of candidates for state office.
SB 1123 forces Tucson to stop using partisan elections, and start using non-partisan elections.
None of these bills has an urgency clause, so they would not go into effect until 90 days after the end of the legislative session. The session will probably end in early July.
According to this story in Tucson Weekly, the Tucson Democratic Party’s attempt to keep Greens out of this November’s partisan city council races is likely to backfire.
The Democratic Party challenged Dave Croteau’s petition to get on the Green Party primary ballot in the 7th district. Party primaries are on September 1, 2009. But because Croteau acknowledges that his petition probably doesn’t have enough signatures of Green registrants in the 7th district, he will bow out of the race. Instead, his campaign manager, Dave Ewoldt, will run as a write-in in the Green primary in September for the same seat. Assuming he gets at least 7 write-ins, he will be nominated and appear on the ballot in November.
Furthermore, Tucson Greens are now mulling over having candidates in the third and fifth districts as well. Arizona has a very fair law on the subject of how many write-in votes are needed in a partisan primary for a candidate to be nominated. The number is proportionate to the number of registered voters in that party. Since Greens don’t have a very large registration, their members only need a small number of write-ins to be nominated in the Green Party primary. Thanks to Gregg Jocoy and Green Party Watch for this story.
Dave Croteau can’t be a write-in in the Green Party primary, because in 2005 the legislature said that candidates who try to get on a ballot and fail cannot then qualify as write-in candidates.
On June 24, Congressmember John Tanner (D-Tennessee) introduced HR 3025, which sets up federal standards for states when they draw U.S. House districts. Here is the 21-page bill. It says that each state must have an Independent State Commission to draw these districts.
The Commissioners would be chosen by the leaders of the two political parties that have the most seats in each state’s legislative bodies (i.e., Democratic and Republican legislative leaders, except in states with non-partisan legislatures, although Nebraska is the only such state). The Commission’s plans must not take into consideration the voting history of a district (unless a separate state law requires it). The plans must not taken into account the partisan registration of any areas, nor the location of residence of incumbent members of the U.S. House.
