On February 7, Virginia House Bill 1414 died in the House Privileges & Elections Committee. It would have provided for party labels on general election ballots for candidates for partisan local office. Virginia is unique in leaving party labels off general election ballots for local partisan elections. Parties have nominees but that information is kept off the ballot.
Before 2000, Virginia even banned party labels for congressional and state office elections.
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.
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).
