On February 3, the Arkansas Senate passed HB 1021, to move the presidential primary from February to May. The bill now goes to the Governor.
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On February 2, the Rules Committee of the Pierce County Council voted 2-1 to repeal ranked choice voting in county elections. If the full Council approves the measure, then the voters would be asked whether they wish to amend the County Charter to make this change. See this newspaper story.
Pierce County is a populous county that includes Tacoma. It used ranked choice voting for the first time in November 2008.
On February 3, the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Moderate Party, a party that exists only in Rhode Island. It challenges one restriction on petitioning to get a new party on the ballot. That restriction makes it illegal to circulate that petition in an odd year. The case is Block v Mollis, 09-047.
The procedure to qualify a new party by petition has existed in Rhode Island since 1994, and it has never been used. It requires signatures of 5% of the last vote cast, and also says the petition can’t be circulated until January 1 of the election year. There seems to be no state interest in stopping a group from circulating the petition in an odd year.
There are few precedents on this issue. The U.S. Supreme Court has seemed to approve of short petitioning windows for petitions that name candidates, but the only case in the U.S. Supreme Court concerning a party petition that had a restriction on when the petition could start to circulate was American Party of Texas v White. The Court upheld the Texas procedure, which doesn’t permit a group to circulate its party petition until primary day. However, the state interest in that start restriction was that the petition could not be signed by voters who had voted in the primary. Neither Rhode Island nor any other state except Texas has a “primary screenout” for petitions to create a new party, so the Texas precedent shouldn’t apply to Rhode Island. Also, the plaintiffs in Texas weren’t complaining about the start date in any event.
Also, Texas special elections were always non-partisan, so if an odd year election were held, it was irrelevant whether a party could petition in that year. Rhode Island special elections are partisan, so it is rational that a new party would want to qualify (or be qualified) in an odd year.
On January 30, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in In Re Nomination Petition of Farnese, concerning the Pennsylvania habit of assessing court costs to the losing side, whenever the validity of a petition is challenged. The Commonwealth Court had kept the challenged candidate on the ballot, and then had billed the challenger $5,251. The Supreme Court will consider whether it was proper to force the challenger to pay this money. The lower court opinion, assessing court costs, is at 948 A 2d 215.
The two bills to improve Arkansas ballot access for minor parties will be heard in the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday, 10 a.m., February 4. The bills (1) ease the vote test so that any statewide office counts; (2) expand the petitioning period for a petition for new parties to get on the ballot.