The Alabama legislature adjourned on May 15 without passing any election law bills of interest. Most surprisingly, even HB 711 failed to pass. HB 711 set up a pilot project for internet voting for overseas voters. It had passed the House 89-3 on April 16, and had passed the Senate unanimously on April 30. But the Senate had added a campaign finance provision. When the bill went to conference committee, the committee removed the campaign finance provision, but then it was too late to send the bill back to the Senate. See this article.

Other election law bills that failed to pass include the ballot access bill, HB 72; the bill to set up a procedure by which write-in candidates who want their write-ins talllied file a declaration of write-in candidacy; and a bill to apportion presidential electors according to what percentage of the popular vote within Alabama they received. Thanks to Ed Still’s VoteLawBlog for the link about HB 711.

On May 15, the Missouri legislature adjourned. No election law bills of interest to most readers of this blog passed this year. The bill that came closest to passing was a bill to make it easier to qualify initiatives. Originally known as SB569, its contents were placed into HB228. It passed the House on April 23 but did not progress through the Senate.

Bills to make it more difficult to qualify initiatives, and to move the independent candidate petition deadline from July to March, failed to pass. A bill to bring back the straight-ticket device failed to pass.

Unfortunately, a bill to improve petitioning for new parties also failed to pass. It was SB 70, and it would have corrected a typographical error in the 1993 ballot access reform bill. Although generally petitions to qualify a new party in Missouri do not need to name that party’s nominees, due to a drafting error, if the party wants to run a candidate for president, the presidential candidate and also candidates for presidential elector must be shown on the petition. However, stand-in presidential candidates are permitted on the petition.

Bills to let cities and counties use Instant Runoff Voting for their own elections failed to pass. Thanks to Ken Bush for some of the news in this post.

On May 15, the Illinois Senate unanimously passed HB 723, which requires qualified parties that nominate after the primary (by party committee) to submit a petition of approximately one-half of 1% of the last vote cast for that party in the last general election, for each nominee. The bill needs to go back to the House for another vote, since the Senate version differs from the House version. The House version was worse; it required petitions of 5% of the last vote cast.