On January 25, the Colorado Secretary of State announced that the No Labels Party petition is valid, and it will be on the ballot in 2024. Thanks to Mike McCorkle for this news.
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On January 26, Adam Schiff announced for the U.S. Senate in 2024 in California. He is a member of the U.S. House. Another Democratic member of the U.S. House, Katie Porter, had already announced. And it is expected that two other Democratic members of the House, Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna, will announce.
This opens the possibility that in the 2024 top-two primary, if there are two fairly evenly-matched Republicans running for U.S. Senate, the two Republicans might conceivably place first and second, leaving Democrats with no candidate for U.S. Senate in November. California does not permit write-ins in the general election for congressional elections. Leaving the voters will no choice but to elect a Republican to the Senate seat would doom the top-two system in California.
New Hampshire Representatives Alvin See and Michael Moffett (both Republicans from Loudon) have introduced HB 363. It eases the declaration of candidacy deadline for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, from June, to the third Monday of July.
It also decouples the petition deadline for such candidates from the date of the non-presidential primary. The bill does not change the petition deadline much, but says it would usually be 13 weeks before the general election. Thirteen weeks works out to early August. The advantage of this is that if the legislature moves the non-presidential primary from September to an earlier date, that would not affect the independent candidate petition deadline. In 2021 the legislature passed a bill moving the September primary to an earlier date, and under the existing law, that change automatically would have moved the independent petition deadlines to an earlier month. The only reason the state hasn’t already moved the date of the September primary to an earlier date is that Governor Chris Sununu vetoed the bill.
On January 26, leaders of the Forward Party of California released a message to supporters, asking them to re-register into the Common Sense Party, and declaring that the Common Sense Party will be, in effect, the name of the California branch of the Forward Party.
The Common Sense Party has been trying for four years to obtain enough voter registrations to qualify as a party in California.
Eight Wyoming legislators have introduced HB 155, which would make ballot access for minor parties and independent candidates more restrictive. Currently large qualified parties nominate by primary in late August, and smaller qualified parties nominate by convention and must submit the names of their nominees by the day before the primary. Also currently, independent candidate petitions are due in late August.
The bill would provide that minor parties would need to choose their nominees no later than 81 days before the primary, which would be early June. Also it would provide that independent candidate petitions would be due in early June.
There are many federal court precedents that independent candidate petition deadlines cannot be earlier than the primary. If this bill were enacted, it would probably be held unconstitutional.
Wyoming has always had liberal petition deadlines for independent candidates. The deadline has always been in October, September, or August of the election year.
The sponsors are all Republicans. The two Senate sponsors are Lynn Hutchings and Cheri Steinmetz. The six House sponsors are Tony Locke, Bill Allemand, Allen Slagle, Scott Smith, Clarence Styvar, and Tamara Trujillo. Representative Smith had an independent opponent last year who came fairly close to winning.