On February 10, the Montana Senate State Administration Committee defeated SB 200. It would have let candidates for non-partisan office, such as school board and judicial elections, put a party label next to their name on the ballot.
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Connecticut Representative Devin Carney (R-Old Saybrook) has introduced HB 5694, a bill for a top-two system. The language of the bill hasn’t been drafted yet, but this description of the bill says it is to be similar to the California system.
On February 15, the Arizona House Committee on Municipal Oversight and Elections passed HCR 2033. This is a proposed state constitutional amendment that would provide that all qualified political parties shall be permitted to place a nominee on the general election ballot. The vote was 6-4.
If the bill passes, the voters would vote on it. If the voters pass it, that would block any attempt to deprive parties of their ability to nominate candidates, and would therefore prohibit a top-four, top-five, or top-two measure.
Fourteen Republican State Senators in New Hampshire have introduced SB 271. It is a very short bill concerning national conventions of political parties. It says, “The New Hampshire delegates shall be seated and have complete voting rights.”
The motive for the bill is the expectation that in 2024, the Democratic Party will refuse to seat some or all of the New Hampshire Democratic delegates who will have been elected in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. The national Democratic Party has recently determined that it wants South Carolina to hold the first Democratic presidential primary, so assuming New Hampshire holds the first presidential primary, the New Hampshire action will violate Democratic national party rules.
Three times, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that national party conventions are free to set their own rules about which delegates get seated. Therefore, SB 271 cannot be enforced even if it is enacted. In 1972 the Democratic national rules did not permit winner-take-all presidential primaries, but California had such a primary, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Democratic national convention to refuse to seat all the California delegates. It also upheld the right of the party to refuse to seat the Illinois delegation, which had broken national party rules on the required diversity of state delegations to national conventions. Those cases were O’Brien v Brown in 1972 (the California case), and Cousins v Wigoda in 1975 (Illinois).
In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled in Democratic Party of the U.S. v La Follette that the 1980 convention had the right to refuse to seat the Wisconsin delegation, because the national party rules banned presidential primaries which were open to all voters (later the Democratic Party gave a waiver to the Wisconsin Democratic Party to allow the open primary to continue to be used).
On February 9, the Mississippi Senate passed SCR 533 and SB 2638. They restore the statewide initiative process. Mississippi had the initiative process until 2021, when the State Supreme Court ruled the old law was fatally flawed and couldn’t be used. The problem with the old law was that it said signatures were needed from all five of the state’s congressional districts, but afterwards the state lost one of its U.S. House districts.
The new bill is considerably harsher than the old law. The old law required signatures of 12% of the last gubernatorial vote, but the new bill requires 12% of the number of registered voters. The old requirement, after the 2019 gubernatorial election, was 106,190 signatures, but the new requirement is approximately 240,000.
The bill says no one may circulate the petition who doesn’t live in Mississippi, and bans paying circulators on a per-signature basis. But the old law had those characteristics also. The new bill requires the 12% requirement to be met in every U.S. House district, but the old law had that provision as well.
The bills now go to the House. If they pass, the voters will vote on the idea in November 2023.