The Republican Party national convention won’t choose a national ticket formally until September 4, 2008. This is beyond the legal deadline for qualified parties to certify their nominees, in a few states.

Recently, bills to ease the deadline have advanced in two states. California SB 293, which applies only to the Republican Party and only to the 2008 election, passed the Senate Elections Committee on April 18. It says the state party chair is supposed to guess who will be nominated, and certify those guesses before the party’s actual convention. The bill doesn’t really explain how to handle the situation if the chair can’t guess, or if his or her guess is wrong.

Montana HB 520 is a better approach. It says that if a party certifies its nominees later than the end of August, that the Secretary of State must accomodate the party, even if the ballots must be reprinted or otherwise altered. HB 520 passed the legislature on April 5.

On April 25, the Montana legislature forwarded SB 270 to the desk of Governor Brian D. Schweitzer. It moves the petition deadline for non-presidential independent candidates, and petitions for the nominees of unqualified parties, from June to March.

Please ask Governor Schweitzer to veto SB 270. His fax is 406-444-5529. His e-mail is governor@mt.gov. His postal address is State Capitol, Helena Mt 59620. He must act by May 5.

The only argument in favor of this bill is that since Democrats and Republicans must file declarations of candidacy in March to run in the June primary, therefore all others ought to act in March as well. But the “equal treatment” argument is fallacious. Candidates running in primaries don’t need petitions. Statewide independent candidates in Montana need 5,000 signatures. Forcing them to submit these petitions in March requires them to petition in winter. Furthermore, non-presidential independent candidate petitions deadlines are unconstitutional, if they are that early. Similar deadlines, for office other than president, have been invalidated in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Even Montana’s old March deadline was invalidated in a Montana lower state court in 1990, which is why the legislature moved it to June in 1991. The Montana Supreme Court then ruled that the plaintiff who filed the 1990 lawsuit didn’t have standing to complain about the deadline, so there was no final judicial opinion in a higher court in Montana.

On April 25, the Alabama House Constitution & Elections Committee passed HB 407. It says that the state’s presidential electors shall be elected proportionately. Alabama currently has 9 electoral votes. If the bill had been in effect in 2004, it would have meant that President Bush would have received 6 electoral votes and Senator Kerry would have received 3 electoral votes (based on the popular vote percentages for each).