FACE (Forum Affairs Commission on Elections)

[Peter]

Section 3. Registrations.
   (c)
...
      (3) If the location of fantasy residence given is not in a State accepted for purposes of registration under paragraph (1), such registration shall be treated as request for deregistration under section 4(d).

Section 4(d) does not exist. Presuming you are referring to Section 4, then I would have to urge a reconsideration here - registrations in places that are not the 51 states + DC should be treated as null and void as opposed to deregistrations. Often times people have jokes and might register in France, or some newbie having just registered in Maine, for example, might then register in Ontario. That this then automatically deregisters them may come as something of a shock and was not intentional. Certainly the department could ask: "Did you want that to be a deregistration?", but it should only be accepting deregistrations where a request that a reasonable person (with no experience of the technicalities of our Laws) would say that somebody has actually asked for it.

[Peter]

I would argue that the Senate has made some determinations of the procedure: See Electoral System Reform Act, Section 9. Where it has declined to make further statutory stipulations, I would argue that the executive should be able to make such regulations that make accepting candidacy declarations practical and sensible provided that it remains within the statutory framework the Senate has laid down.

[Peter]

In 2(f), I think that you can safely include Senate runoffs as well as special elections.

[Peter]

Regarding Consolidation legislation:

As I understand it, once the present amending bills to the ESRA have come to their conclusion, Senator Hawk plans to introduce a bill to consolidate the provisions of existing electoral law into one bill for ease of reference.

There are a few points surrounding this that I want to raise:

1. When we put Sections 1-3 of the UEC back into force whilst taking Sections 1-4 of the ESRA out of force, we actually lost a little bit of reform that hadn't been intended, namely:

a. The provision in Section 1, Clause 7 of the ESRA that allowed for Senate votes in the wrong district to be considered non-extant.
b. The provision in Section 4, Clause 5 of the ESRA that allowed for the SC to delay runoff elections where litigation was pending.

If we are consolidating, I do not think it would hurt to put these back in.

2. Something Ernest raised with me whilst the Flexi-Time Amendment was in the pipeline was that there is no longer certainty over when the candidacy declaration period will end because we have statutorily fixed it at 7 days before the election begins, but even under the new arrangements just passed, we do not know when the election begins until the SoFA announces it 7 days before hand.

I think it would be prudent to move the end of candidacy declarations to something like 7 days before the earliest possible opening time for a regular election, thus meaning that everybody would know when the deadline is, and would not be guessing.

3. Presently runoff elections and elections caused by the victory of NOTA start on a Thursday at 1800 EST under statute. It may be advisable to move these to the same flexi-time arrangements as exist for regular and special elections.

[Peter]

That would be quite difficult as we are dealing with a constitutional requirement: Article V, Section 2, Clause 8

If any voter will be unable to vote in a federal election during the time allotted, he or she may request to absentee vote at any time between the end of the filing deadline for candidates and the beginning of the election. The Senate may by appropriate legislation determine the procedure for absentee voting.

There may be a little wiggle room in that the requirement only talks about "request", not about the actual act of casting the absentee ballot, though we should be careful not to abuse intent.