Oregon Senator Suzanne Weber (R-Tillamook) has introduced SB 499. It moves the primary for all office from May to the first Tuesday in March. Thanks to FrontloadingHQ for this news.
The bill would have no effect on minor party petition dates or nominating convention dates.
Connecticut puts parties on the ballot in the order of their vote in the last gubernatorial election. In 2018, the Connecticut Independent Party won the third line by outpolling the Working Families Party in the gubernatorial race. But in 2022, the Working Families Party regained the third line by outpolling the Independent Party.
The Independent Party in past gubernatorial elections had always nominated the Republican nominee, until 2022, when it ran its own nominee, who polled .98%. It was the first time in the Independent Party’s history that it had run for a statewide state office in Connecticut and failed to get 1%. In Connecticut, where qualified status is office-by-office, the vote test is 1%, so the Independent Party is no longer qualified for governor, although it still is for all the other statewide state offices.
Georgia will hold a special election on January 31 to fill the vacant State Senate seat, district 11. Because it is a special election, no candidate needs a petition. Only three candidates filed, a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian, John Monds. It is extremely unusual for any third party to ever be on a Georgia ballot for State Senate, because in regular elections, about 6,000 signatures are needed.
This NBC News story about Kyrsten Sinema says that if she runs as an independent for U.S. Senate in 2024, “it’s a relatively low threshold as ballot access goes.” It says she would need 43,492 signatures, which is generally accurate, although not precisely so. The true number can’t be known until spring 2024, but the number in the story is close to what it probably will be.
The story goes wrong when it says Arizona has a “relatively low threshold”. The Arizona 2024 statewide independent petition requirement is the fifth largest number of signatures in the nation. The only states with a higher number are Georgia, New York, North Carolina, and Texas. Even Alabama and Indiana, two of the most severe states, require fewer than Arizona. Indiana requires 36,944 which is lower than in past years because of poor turnout in 2022.
On December 4, New York Assemblymember Stacy Pheffer Amato was declared the winner of the 23rd district race, defeating her Republican opponent by fifteen votes. The race outcome had been in doubt until December 4. See this story.
Key to Pheffer Amato’s win was the discovery that about a dozen voters had cast a regular ballot for her, and had also written her name in. The vote-counting machines had rejected those votes because the machine could not possibly know that the voters had not voted for two different people (thus making their ballots invalid). Instead the voters had voted for her twice. Only human beings, not a machine, were capable of understanding these ballots.
This is similar to what happened in Florida in 2000, when about 7,000 voters voted for Al Gore the normal way and also wrote him in. About 3,000 voters did the same for George W. Bush. The machines rejected all those ballots because the machines thought the voters had voted for two different candidates for the same office, thus making their votes invalid.
No one knew about those Florida votes until November 2001, when a consortium of news organizations recounted all the Florida votes by hand and released the findings. Al Gore had never requested a recount of the overvotes (he only asked that the undervotes be counted).
