The congressional bill to expand the size of the U.S. House from 435 to 437 members, with a new member for Utah and a voting member for the District of Columbia, is likely to receive a vote in the House in May. It has already passed the Senate. See this article in the April 1 Washington Post, which highlights that the U.S. Justice Department’s original analysis this year was that the bill is unconstitutional, but the Attorney General himself reversed that position.
On April 1, the West Virginia House passed HB 2981. This is the bill that lowers the number of signatures for new party and independent candidates from 2% of the last vote cast, to 1%, and also moves the non-presidential petition deadline from May to August. Now the bill goes to the Senate.
On April 1, the Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee passed HB 1072, after first amending it to make it better. As amended, the bill sets the petition for a new or previously unqualified party at 3% of the last gubenatorial vote. The House had earlier passed it at 5% of the last gubernatorial vote. The newly-amended bill for 2010 would require approximately 28,000 valid signatures.
The Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee also passed HB 2246, which makes initiatives somewhat easier to get on the ballot.
On March 31, New York held a special election to fill the vacant 20th U.S. House seat. The absentee ballots will not be counted until April 6, so no one knows who won. The tally for votes cast at the polling place are 77,344 for Democrat-Working Familes-Independence nominee Scott Murphy, and 77,279 for Republican-Conservative nominee James Tedisco. The third candidate, Eric Sundwall, the Libertarian nominee, was removed from the ballot, although the absentee ballots have his name included on them because they were printed before he was removed.
California will hold a run-off special election to fill the vacant State Senate seat, 26th district, on May 19. The district is in Los Angeles County. The three candidates on the ballot will be Democrat Curren Price, Republican Nachum Schifren, and Peace & Freedom Party member Varela Henderson.
