The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on September 18, on the bill to give the District of Columbia its own voting member of the U.S. House, plus an additional seat for Utah. The bills are S1257 and HR 1906.
The House will probably vote on HR 811 next week as well. HR 811 is Congressman Rush Holt’s bill to require vote-counting the states to use vote-counting machines with a paper trail, when they conduct federal elections.
On September 11, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 924, which would have directed the California Secretary of State to place a non-binding referendum question on the February 2008 ballot, asking voters about U.S. policy in Iraq.
Unity08 has begun telling how many members it has on its web page, unity08.org. On August 30 that web page reported 102,879 members. On September 12 that figure was adjusted to 103,947 members. Approximately 22,000 Unity08 members responded to a recent Unity08 survey. The results show that Unity08 members consider terrorism to be the nation’s most pressing problem, followed closely by problems with the integrity and accountability of public officials.
The faction of the Prohibition Party that does not recognize Earl Dodge as national chair is holding its presidential convention in Indianapolis, September 13-14. One of the delegates is blogging from the convention; see the link below. The blog reports that Sarah Ward, immediate past president of the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and current president of the World WCTU, stopped by to give greetings to the Prohibition Party convention. The WCTU is holding its own national gathering in the same hotel in Indianapolis.
Ballot Access News has just learned that the Florida legislature this year altered nomination procedures for qualified minor parties. Under the old law, qualified parties with less than 5% of the voter registration nominated by convention. Under the new law (House Bill 537), all qualified parties nominate by primary. Florida has approximately 25 qualified parties.
Florida does not permit write-in votes in primaries. Florida also provides that no party will actually have primary ballots printed up for any particular office, unless more than a single candidate files for that office. Florida has very high filing fees. Therefore, in practice, it is unlikely that any qualified minor party will actually hold a primary, since it is unlikely that two members of the same minor party will actually file to run against each other for the same office.
The real difference the new law makes, is that any member of a qualified minor party is now free to seek (and most likely, obtain) the nomination of his or her party, just by filing for the “primary”. Thus, a qualified minor party whose state convention doesn’t wish to nominate anyone for a particular office has now lost the flexibility to make such a “none of the above” choice. On the other hand, qualified minor parties do have some protection, since no one may file for the primary of any party who has not been a member of that party for 6 months.
HB 537 did not alter eligibility for a presidential primary. As before, qualified minor parties may not have their own presidential primary. Thanks to Sean Concannon for this news.
