Bills have been introduced in both houses of the Missouri legislature to let local governments use Instant-Runoff voting for their own elections. The bills are SB303 by Senator Jeff Smith (D-St. Louis) and HB 463 by Representative Jake Zimmerman (D-Olivette).
Maryland State Senator Richard Colburn (R-Cambridge) has introduced SB 327. It requires run-off general elections, if no candidate received 50%. The bill also requires run-off primaries when no one got 50% in a primary. The run-offs would be held 3 weeks later.
A bill has been introduced in the Georgia House to make it illegal for people to work on voter registration drives, unless they are registered voters in Georgia. It is HB 225, by five Republican representatives: Ed Rynders, Jeff May, Jay Roberts, Edward Lindsey, and Tom Rice.
Specifically, the bill says, “Voter registration applications shall be distributed only by persons who are registered voters of this state and voter registration drives shall be conducted only by persons who are registered voters of this state.”
The bill, if enacted, would probably be unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Buckley v American Constitutional Law Foundation. That 1999 decision said states cannot require petition circulators to be registered voters. Presumably the First Amendment principles involving petition circulators also apply to people engaged in asking people if they wish to fill out a voter registration form.
New York Assemblyman David Gantt (D-Rochester) has introduced a bill to prohibit two parties from jointly nominating the same candidate. The bill is A2399. It makes an exception for judicial candidates, and would continue to allow multiple parties to cross-endorse the same judicial nominees.
On February 10, Virginia HB 2642 passed the House of Delegates unanimously. It makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis. The bill even makes it illegal to give a bonus for good performance. An almost identical law in Ohio was declared unconstitutional by the 6th circuit in 2008. The bill now goes to the Senate.
