It strikes me as odd that a list of declared write-in candidates has to be posted at the polling place. Why not just put them on the ballot? It would seem to be easier.

The deadline was changed by the legislature in 2005(HB 2339). The primary purpose of that bill was to set a deadline for mailing overseas ballots to 45 days before the election.

Working backwards from that date, the legislature set a deadline of 62 days before the election for the Secretary of State to certify state and district candidates to the county election authorities. This gives the counties about 2 weeks to prepare and print the ballots. In Texas, elections are conducted by the 254 counties.

It appears that the Secretary of State will be able to meet this deadline, such that counties will face no delay in beginning the preparation of their ballots.

The deadline for naming presidential candidates and write-in candidates was then set to 70 days (it had been 60). As noted earlier, the deadlines for on-ballot candidates for other offices was several months ago.

Texas has early voting in person, or by mail. Early voting in person is available to any voter, and is the two weeks before election day. Early voting by mail is restricted to the elderly, persons with disabilities, who are incarcerated, or who will be out of their county for the entire early voting period.

Early voting in person can generally be done at several locations within the county. So the election officials must be able to set up the voting machines or ballots so that the correct races are presented to voters. The same must be done for early voting by mail.

The deadline for candidates to be placed on the ballot is much earlier, generally based on when the nominees for the party were selected. The latest would have been for statewide offices for parties nominating by convention. The state convention is in June, with the names of the nominees provided to the Secretary of State within 20 days. Also, the Secretary of State’s web site does not show District Attorneys and District Judges, so the actual list has a few 100 more offices.

The deadline for the Secretary of State certifying the candidates to the county election officials is 62 days before the election. It is at that point the county election officials may begin preparing the ballots, integrating the candidates for statewide and district office, with those for county and precinct office (who file with their county, rather than the state).

It appears that the Secretary of State will be able to certify the Democratic and Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates by that deadline (September 3 in 2008).

Early voting starts October 20th. So there are only 55 Days for the texas SOS to prepare and distribute the ballots. Now does texas do a mailing like we do here in California? It is starting to look to me that 70 Days is a very short time period.

Keep in mind this 70 day limit is used for all offices not just the president.

Texas has the following offices being contested

15 Justices
7 court of apeals cheif justices
150 State Representatives
15 State Senators
7 members state board of education
3 judges, criminal court of apeals
2 justices of the supreme court
1 chief justice of the supreme court
1 rail road commisioner
32 us representatives
1 us senator
1 us president

For a total of 235 positions open. Texas might have changed the deadline to make it easier to get all of those offices ballots ready with the correct ones for each precinct.

Brough to you by …

The Committee to slowly bring you poverty, tax you, not represent you, destroy the Constitution, trample your rights, mislead you, lower your expectations, export your capital and job opportunities, blow smoke for “news” on tv or in news-papers, bring back colonial status to the United States of owned by oil.

F.A. Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom” – but not as a training manual.

Texas law also requires early voting by mail to be conducated as much as possible in the same manner as in person voting. Presumably this would include having the names of declare write-in candidates available to the voter as they filled out their ballot. So mail voting may well require inclusion of a list of declared write-in candidates.

Also, by mail ballots may require a write-in space and box be provided for offices where there are declared write-in candidates.

“(a) In resolving constitutional challenges to a State’s election laws, a court must first consider the character and magnitude of the asserted injury to the rights protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments that the plaintiff seeks to vindicate. It must then identify and evaluate the interests asserted by the State to justify the burden imposed by its rule. In passing judgment, the Court must not only determine the legitimacy and strength of each of these interests, it must also consider the extent to which those interests make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights. Only after weighing all these factors is the court in a position to decide whether the challenged provision is unconstitutional.”

The Texas parties have a 1st Amendment right to politically associate with the national parties, in particular with regard to the nomination of presidential candidates by the national conventions.

The State of Texas recognizes this right by requiring the Texas parties to hold presidential primaries which are the basis for the allocation of national delegates. It also requires the Texas parties to choose the national delegates at state party conventions. But the association with a national party via the national convention is meaningless if a Texas party is not able to place the names of the presidential nominee selected at the convention on the ballot.

And what rationale could the State offer? That if they didn’t have the names by 70 days before the election, that the Secretary of State could not certify the candidates by 62 days before the election? Since the Secretary of State will apparently certify the candidates by that date, it can hardly argue that there was a reason enforcing the deadline, especially given the harm to the parties, and the voters.

But, this is only for cases where either the party officials or state officials had not done their job. There is another case where a Party official told an elected county clerk to send her application and they gave her the wrong zipcode. Again the court ruled that her application should be accepted.

What was more interesting to me is that in Francis, the majority decsion specifically said yes some application and petition issues can be corrected but then when on to list issues that rueling specifically did not cover and among these is:

Third, it does not allow political parties or candidates to ignore statutory deadlines; it allows candidates only the time that the Election Code was designed to give them.

Now the question is likely to be: Looking at the Secretary of State Website http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/candidates/runpres07.shtml

The Elections division:

States the Deadlines as follows:
Republican or Democratic Party Primary Candidates
The filing deadline may not be any later than 6:00 p.m. on January 2, 2008.
No other deadline is mentioned.

Minor Party Candidates
their filing deadlines may not be any later than 5:00 p.m. on January 2, 2008.

Independent Candidates
The application must be submitted with a petition, and both documents must be filed no later than the second Monday in May, May 12, 2008. For 2008, the petition must contain 74,108 signatures of registered voters who did not vote in the presidential primary of either party. The first possible day to circulate the petitions is March 5, 2008.

Write-in Candidates
The declaration may not be filed earlier than July 27, 2008, or later than 5:00 p.m. of August 26, 2008.

So to hazard a guess I think the Dems and Republicans are going to claim they did as they were instructed by the Secretary of State and that missing the deadline was due to the secretary of state missleading them.