Connecticut Bill Would Make it Illegal for a Party to Nominate a Non-Member

The Connecticut Joint Government Administration & Election Committee has introduced SB 1146, which says, “No candidate who is not enrolled as a member of a party may be endorsed by such party.” The bill’s intent is to abolish fusion, but it goes further, and says no one can be nominated by a party if he or she is not a member of that party.

The fact that the Committee itself has introduced this bill suggests that the leadership of the Democratic majority in the legislature has determined to eliminate fusion. However, the bill is poorly drafted, and would seem to violate what the U.S. Supreme Court said, in dicta, in Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut, 479 U.S. 208, in 1986. The decision says, on page 215, “Were the State to…provide that only Party members might be selected as the Party’s chosen nominees for public office, such a prohibition of potential association with nonmembers would clearly infringe upon the rights of the Party’s members under the First Amendment to organize with like-minded citizens in support of common political goals.”


Comments

Connecticut Bill Would Make it Illegal for a Party to Nominate a Non-Member — No Comments

  1. As usual – the 1st Amdt has been perverted by SCOTUS since 1968 regarding elections.

    i.e. ballot access has ZERO to do with elections.

    See the 1776 era State bills of rights.

    Public nominations for public offices by public electors according to public LAWS – i.e. ALL electors (top 2 primaries,etc.) or SOME electors (all the other combinations of nomination stuff).

  2. @1&2, You are correct in your first post. Access to the November ballot, the ballot from which people are actually elected to office, if a matter of the First Amendment in my opinion. I as a voter have my constitutional right to speech restricted because I can not exercise my speech via voting for whom I want to see elected.

  3. If Connecticut adopted candidate-based qualification as happens under the Top 2 Open Primary system, as opposed to the party-based qualification, the problem of con-fusion disappears.

  4. Presumably this only applies for parties that are ballot-qualified for the offices they’re running in? Otherwise the language of this proposals seems to me that it might prevent any new parties from gaining ballot access.

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