If any Utah political candidate wanted to act like Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., they likely couldn't count on being saved by the courts.
That's because Utah has one of the most restrictive candidate-replacement laws in the nation, one not easily bypassed by a court ruling.
To refresh your memory, Torricelli, severely criticized by the U.S. Senate's ethics committee for taking free gifts, this past week quit his re-election campaign saying he wouldn't be responsible for the Democrats losing their one-seat majority in the Senate.
Trouble is, New Jersey law says you can't replace a candidate on the ballot within 51 days of the general election. Torricelli quit 36 days out.
But Democrats quickly went to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled that Democrats could put former U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg on the ballot in place of Torricelli. Now Republicans are going to the U.S. Supreme Court trying to get the state court ruling overturned.
The New Jersey court said putting Lautenberg on the ballot — even though it was past the deadline — serves the public's interest and helps maintain America's basic two-political-party system.
Utah's candidate law is even tougher than New Jersey's.
Basically, a candidate has to either die or get a medical doctor to certify that he can't continue his campaign for physical or mental medical reasons. If that happens, then the party's state central committee can meet and put up a new candidate.
Obviously, those special conditions don't happen often.
The last time I can remember it happening in a major race was in the 1980s when the late Dave Watson, a Democratic Salt Lake County commissioner, was arrested for a DUI the summer before his re-election. Watson did get a doctor to certify he was under such mental stress that he couldn't run again, and Democrats replaced him on the ballot.
But it was a painful experience for Watson, basically having to say he was too nuts to run. But in fact if you talked to Watson, as I did, it was clear he wasn't mentally incapacitated, just really embarrassed by his troubles and likely going to lose his re-election because of them.
Torricelli, like Watson, is not physically or mentally incapacitated. Torricelli quit because he was behind in the polls to his GOP challenger and headed for defeat.
Utah tightened its candidate-replacement law more than 30 years ago in part, I'm told, because legislators and some party activists were sick of the games being played.
Party leaders were filling their candidate slots, especially for legislative and minor county party offices, with live bodies of loyal party members who really had no intention of remaining on the ballot.
After the spring candidate filing deadline, party leaders would lobby prospective candidates heavily, and sometime in the late spring or early summer, before the county and state party conventions and the September primary, the filed candidate would quit the race and the "hand-picked" candidate would get in.
Too messy. Too uncertain for opposing candidates and the public alike, legislators said.
So the tough candidate-replacement law was adopted.
Now we have a very different election cycle. Candidates file in March, have county conventions in April, state conventions in May and a late June primary. Candidates spend all summer raising money, walking districts, and for the most part, staying low until the fall general campaigns really begin.
If the Legislature refuses to truncate the process by having a late spring filing deadline, August conventions and a September primary — which makes a lot more sense to me — then the least lawmakers should do is revisit the candidate-replacement law.
Political parties should be able to replace a candidate sometime in the summer if, for whatever reason, the candidate doesn't want to continue his campaign.
Especially in legislative races, it is often the case that a candidate is all excited to run in March when he files. But by the summer he's basically given up his campaign, not trying to raise money for fliers and signs, not walking his neighborhoods talking to voters. The other major party candidate can win almost by default in that case.
Party leaders, and perhaps some local party people who would like to pick up the gauntlet and run, must stand by frustrated and watch a race they had a shot at go to the opposing party.
In rarer occasions, an incumbent legislator may be well on his way to victory only to run afoul of the law, have a messy divorce jump up, or some other public issue arise. The legislator would gladly quit his campaign if he could. And someone else from his party likely could be found to run, even in the last month or two of the campaign.
Instead, the seat, solidly in that lawmaker's party column, is lost and for two or four years those citizens will be represented by someone in the political minority of that district. That doesn't make much sense, either.
Bottom line is, we should do just about anything we can to get good people to run for public office and to give voters the widest range of candidates possible. We should all want dedicated, motivated people in our Legislature, picked fairly by as many voters as possible.
We shouldn't be so severely restricting candidate access to the ballot.
Deseret News political editor Bob Bernick Jr. may be reached by e-mail at bbjr@desnews.com.