Unfortunately, the blog post of May 16, saying that the Missouri legislature had passed SB 797, was mistaken. The bill had passed the Senate, and then on May 14 had passed the House, but the House had added something new to the bill, so it needed to be passed by the Senate again.

On May 16, the Senate concurred in the amendments, so it appeared that the bill had passed entirely. But in Missouri, that wasn’t enough; the Senate not only had to concur in the addition, but it had to pass the bill again as a separate action. Although the bill had no opposition, the legislature went home without doing that final action. Thanks to Barbara Woodruff for pointing out the original error. The bill would have corrected the typographical error in the law that was passed in 1993. Generally a group is free to circulate a petition for recognition in Missouri before it has chosen its nominees. But the glitch means that if the group wants to run a presidential candidate, it must list the presidential candidate on the petition. Fortunately the Secretary of State permits a stand-in presidential candidate, who can be changed later.

On May 24, Hillary Clinton said that she supports amending the U.S. Constitution so that U.S. citizens who live in Puerto Rico may vote in the general election for president. She had previously said that she supports that idea for Guam as well. As far as is known, no one else running for president this year has expressed the same viewpoint.

There are three classes of legally competent adult U.S. citizens who are still denied full voting rights. They are (1) residents of U.S. territories; (2) felons in almost all states and ex-felons in some states; (3) members and supporters of minor parties and independent candidates. There are advocacy groups working to solve the problems of all three groups. It would be desirable if those who are concerned about each of these problems would recognize that all three groups have much in common.

The supreme irony of the ban on voting for president for U.S. citizens who live in the territories is that U.S. citizens who live in foreign countries may vote in U.S. elections, if those citizens have ever at one time lived in a U.S. state. They may leave the U.S. and continue voting by absentee ballot for decades, even though they never again set foot in the U.S. Yet if such overseas absentee voters were then to move to a U.S. territory, they would at that moment lose their voting rights.