[EL] I was hoping to get a thread going with my info about idiotic Texas deadlines

[Richard Winger]

It is just an accident of bad bill drafting.  The independent presidential petition deadline date is set in the law.  But the deadline for minor party petitions, and independent candidates for other office, is tied to the date of the primary.  So when the primary moves, those latter two deadlines move, but the independent presidential date doesn't move.

Richard Winger

415-922-9779

PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147

--- On Fri, 12/16/11, Larry Levine <larrylevine at earthlink.net> wrote:

From: Larry Levine <larrylevine at earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: [EL] I was hoping to get a thread going with my info about idiotic Texas deadlines
To: richardwinger at yahoo.com, law-election at uci.edu
Date: Friday, December 16, 2011, 4:27 PM

Does “let’s protect our governor” sound like it might be a reason? Was this done legislatively or by executive fiat?Larry  From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Winger
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 4:23 PM
To: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: [EL] I was hoping to get a thread going with my info about idiotic Texas deadlines  When I sent a link to my article about the ludicrous Texas petition deadlines to this list, I was hoping to stimulate others to comment.

Just to reiterate, Texas now requires an independent presidential candidate to submit a petition on May 14, but an independent candidate for any other office is not due until July 5.  Furthermore, the independent presidential petition needs about 40% more signatures than the independent petition for any other statewide office.

To my mind, there is no conceivable argument for why Texas should require independent presidential candidate petitions almost two months before independent petitions for other office, especially given Anderson v Celebrezze saying that states must go easier for independent presidential candidates than for candidates for other office.  Does anyone disagree with me?

The mainstream media, even in Texas, seems utterly oblivious to this, even though there is so much media attention this year to the idea of independent and new political party presidential candidates.  I am disappointed that no one seems to want to talk about this.

Richard Winger
415-922-9779
PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20111216/524c5bec/attachment.html>