Ohio House Bill 638, which lets candidates who use the independent petition procedure choose a partisan label (which would then be printed on the November ballot next to the candidate’s name) could conceivably be enacted this month. The 2005-2006 session of the legislature is sitting at least until December 21. The bill had a favorable hearing last week. Bills tend to move very fast when a legislature is in its last few days.
The North Carolina Libertarian Party’s ballot access lawsuit is set for a trial on April 2, 2007, in state court in Raleigh. Earlier this year the State Board of Elections had tried to get the court to eliminate this trial, but the Board lost that motion.
Doug Bailey, one of the co-founders of Unity.08, has told the Daily Camera newspaper of Boulder, Colorado, that the group will nominate its presidential and vice-presidential candidates in June 2008. Bailey also said that the 2008 Democratic and Republican Party nominees cannot be the nominees of Unity.08. Earlier, some had speculated that the Unity.08 process might nominate either the Republican Party national ticket, or the Democratic Party national ticket. But Bailey has ruled out this scenario.
On December 8, the 9th circuit struck down Nevada’s law, requiring an initiative petition to contain 10% of the last vote cast in each of 13 counties (Nevada has 17 counties). The case is ACLU v Lomax, no. 04-17033.
The decision was not surprising, since in 2003 the 9th circuit had also struck down a similar distribution requirement for Idaho initiatives.
The basis for these decisions is highly theoretical, and depends on the Equal Protection portion of the 14th amendment. Counties vary in population. State laws that require any type of statewide petitions to contain a certain number of signatures in a certain number of counties discriminate in favor of voters who live in small-population counties, and against voters who live in large-population counties. For example, even if every voter in Nevada’s two largest counties wanted to sign a particular initiative petition, but no voters in any other counties wanted to sign it, that initiative could not get on the ballot under the Nevada law. Yet the two largest counties have 87% of Nevada’s population.
Yet, if the situation were reversed, and an initiative was wildly popular in Nevada’s 15 smallest-population counties, and had no support in the two largest counties, it could qualify.
The only state that still has a county-distribution requirement for statewide candidate petitions is Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania requires candidates seeking a place on a statewide primary ballot to collect 2,000 signatures, with a certain number of signatures in each of 10 counties. It is overwhelmingly likely that this law would be invalidated, if someone were to sue. Pennsylvania state courts have upheld the law in the past, but those decisions were erroneous. No federal court has upheld the Pennsylvania distribution requirement. The Pennsylvania requirement applies to state office only, not federal office, but that is no defense.
On December 7, the Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives appointed Constitution Party member Rick Jore to be chair of the House Education Committee. Jore said he had not asked for the chairmanship and that he is surprised.
Although it may seem peculiar that the majority party in a legislature would let a minor party member chair a committee, it is not unknown. In the last session of the Vermont legislature, a Progressive Party legislator chaired the Agriculture Committee.
