While the state house and state senate are out of session and the budget is still not approved there is bipartisan support to change Pennsylvania’s Presidential primary election day.
During the presidential primary elections often by the time Pennsylvania’s take to the polls the winner of their respected party has won the nomination. But there is bipartisan support to move the primary presidential election from April to March to give Pennsylvania’s a larger impact in primary elections.
The problem according to State Senator Scott Hutchinson has been logistics and deciding on which day to hold the election.
“We’ve been talking about this for several months. But there are problems with picking a certain date over another. It’s a logistical problem more than anything,” Hutchinson said. “So until that magic date can be found, we’re not going to be able to do anything. But once it is found, we’ll be able to get it done really quick.”
PA Secretary of State Al Schmidt wrote an op-ed for Politics PA criticizing the Senate for remaining out of session while wanting to accomplish moving up primary dates. But Hutchinson responded to Schmidt only calling out one legislative while both are currently out of session.
“I was curious that the Secretary of the State was just referred to the senate,” said Hutchinson. “Because it takes both bodies and neither have moved a bill to change the primary date. Both houses of the legislative have to be recalled too.”
Hutchinson would go on to say that the there is no set time table to a complete bill to move the primary date up. The only challenge with waiting would be for the counties who would get last second notifications.
“We could [vote on this] in November. Would that cause headaches for people? Absolutely. Counties would be scrambling to pull things together if we did it that late. But, it could be done that late,” Hutchinson said.
Once the bill is written and passed in either the house or the senate it will not have to wait a long time to be approved according to Hutchinson.
“We’ve been talking about this for months now and could not find that magic date, I’m hopping we can find that quickly and then the whole legislative journey will happen very quickly.
Hutchinson does expect Senator President Kim Ward to call the senate back before the original September date.
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