Talk:Secretary of state (U.S. state government)

MSOS vs. SOS of M
EdwinHJ, I respect your attention to detail, but I'm reverting your edit. Please allow me to explain.

First of all, no one here is claiming that anyone has the title, "Secretary of State of Minnesota", as opposed to "Minnesota Secretary of State". The title held by all of these people is either "Secretary of State" or "Secretary of the Commonwealth". I mean, perhaps in some states the name of the state is included in the title, but I have lived in three states, and in none of them was there an official inclusion of the state's name. Same thing with Governor. If I refer to Janet Napolitano as the governor of Arizona, her title is still "Governor Napolitano", not "Governor of Arizona Napolitano". Yet if I listed all of the governors in a column, then I might list them as "Governor of Alabama, Governor of Alaska, Governor of Arizona, etc."

Of course, with the governors, with each state having the exact same title, I could get away with not listing the title at all—I could just have a table labeled "State Governors" and list the states in one column and the office holder in the next. That would solve your concerns with this table. Except that we can't do it for the SOSs. This is because three of the SOSs are called something different (Sec of the Commonwealth), so we do need to list the title.

Secondly, simple aesthetic considerations push us towards listing them all the same way. It's simply easier to read them if they all follow the same pattern. And ease of use is one thing we should strive for if our goal is to make information universally acceptable, right?

I will be happy to discuss this further with you, Edwin. Unschool 21:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Redundant tables
We now have two tables in this article showing us the names of the 44/47 Secretaries of State. It looks redundant to me. Shouldn't we remove one of them? I think that the table which takes up less room is the better one to keep, but I'll not do anything for a while, and see what others might want to do. Unschool 17:07, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Lt. Governors & SoS's
I think that the Lt. Governors of the three states that have no SoS should not be included in this list. It lends the impression that the two jobs are the same, but that they just have different titles. This of course is not true. If we look at at the list of Lieutenant Governors, we will not see the SoS listed in the place of those eight states that have no Lt. Governors. For the simple sake of accuracy, we need to exclude them from this list.

It is, however, important that the article continue to state that the Lt. Governor's often do some of the functions that would normally be done by an SoS. Unschool 02:30, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization
I have checked about a dozen of the official websites for state SoS's, and ALL of them capitalize the word "State". I know wiki rules are to not capitalize title after the first letter automatically, but we DO do it when that's how it's done out in the world. Moving back. Unschool 21:50, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
 * MOS:JOBTITLES tells us that when naming a specific office, using the full official title, especially in reference to its holder, we capitalize, and that's more or less what those state websites are doing. When discussing the general concept of the office, there's no reason to capitalize it. Ibadibam (talk) 01:44, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm no expert in these matters, but a question that occurs to me right now is, why do capitalize the "J" in Chief Justice of the United States? Un  sch  ool  05:14, 4 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Good question, especially since we favor sentence case in Wikipedia for things like article and section titles. According to the JOBTITLES style guideline I linked above, when capitalizing a person's title, every "important" word is capitalized (for a full explanation of which words are "important", see the guideline on composition titles). Ibadibam (talk) 19:13, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Redundant tables?
Currently we have a large (in terms of area on the page) listing of all the SOSes, and a smaller, more wiki-style chart at the bottom of the page. The larger listing is, if memory serves, a holdover from a separate article/list that was merged with this article on the office some time ago. I think if I were to have my druthers, this larger list would be deleted, in favor of the smaller table at the bottom which did not then exist. The only loss would be the direct external links that currently exist in the righthand column. For my part, I think that the aesthetic enhancement is worth the loss, but I thought I'd put it out there for other opinions. Should this big table in the middle of the article be deleted? Unschool (talk) 01:33, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It's been nearly two months and there has been no comment, one way or the other, on my suggestion. I think I will probably go ahead and delete the extra table. Unschool (talk) 19:25, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

What term encompasses all of these: American states, territories, and commonwealths?
You undid an edit that clarified that not only states but also territories had Secretaries of State that are first in line of succession and gave one example. Undoing that edit, the article now only makes reference to states, even though territories also have a similar situation. The edit did not offer a SECOND example, only ONE in reference to territories. I would suggest you take another look at your undoing of the edit which drew my attention since it refers to US territories and Puerto Rico---restoring the edit would make it clerar that there are two different types of jurisdictions, one example of each. Pr4ever (talk) 22:00, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmmmmm. I really don't think this is a big deal, but I think I see your point.  Let me explain my thinking: First, I removed Puerto Rico because I did (and still do) tend to think that a single example is usually best (I have seen many articles over the years where everyone wants to include their personal favorite example, ruining a sentence).  Second, I removed "territories" because it is an inaccurate term—Puerto Rico is not a "territory".  Still, I am willing to cover all bases, provided we can find the proper wording.  My first choice would be to find an all-encompassing word to replace both "states" and "territories".  For example, the first thing that came to my mind was:

''In those jurisdictions with no Lieutenant Governor. . . the Secretary of State is sometimes first in the line of succession in the event of a gubernatorial vacancy.''
 * I would go straight to this version if I was confident that "jurisdiction" were an appropriate word for this, but I am not sure it is. I think of "jurisdictions" as referring only to the authority of courts and law enforcement officials.  Can you think of another word that would replace both "states" and "territories"?  Un  sch  ool  18:15, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * My impulse is "sovereignties" but I'm not sure that admistrative things that are neither states nor countries are a member of that group. Maybe "governments"? htom (talk) 23:48, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmmmmm. Sovereignties, definately not.  "Governments" does technically appear correct, but it also appears very clumsy.  I'm going to transfer this discussion to  Talk:Secretary of State (U.S. state government); maybe we can get some more ideas there.  Un  sch  ool  03:16, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments. Actually, PR IS a territory.  The United States Constitution, only recognizes three types of jurisdictions within the nation---the District of Columbia, states (Art 4 Sec 3 cl. 1) and territories (Art 4, Sec. 3, cl 2).  The word "Commonwealth" is simply a part of the official name of six of the jurisdictions (Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusets, which are states, and Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas, which are territories), just as "Plantation", a part of the name of Rhode Island (which is a state, but about the size of a few old Southern plantations!).  Suffice it to say that the most recent Congressional and Federal judicial expressions on the issue (Congressional Committee report on HR 900 last April, and court opinion by Federal judge Gustavo Gelpí in October) clearly restate that PR is a territory, so you're safe in using the phrase "states and territories".Pr4ever (talk) 09:20, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's news to me. Could you provide me with a link to these places where I could learn that DC and PR are territories?  We old fogies need to keep up, you know.  Un  sch  ool  01:58, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
 * DC is not a territory, but the federal district is clearly defined in the US Constitution, see Amendment 23, which states:

"1. The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

With respect to the fact that Puerto Rico is a territory under Art. 4, Sec. 3, cl. 2, Federal District Judge Gustavo Gelpí, in a recent Medicaid-related case, determined the following:

"Let it be clear. The court today is in no way attempting to overrule the Insular Cases as applied to the U.S. territories — only the Supreme Court can.  The court, rather, today holds that in the particular case of Puerto Rico, a monumental constitutional evolution based on continued and repeated congressional annexation has taken place.  Given the same, the territory has evolved from an unincorporated to an incorporated one.  Congress today, thus, must afford Puerto Rico and the 4,000,000 United States citizens residing therein all constitutional guarantees.  To hold otherwise, would amount to the court blindfolding itself to continue permitting Congress per secula seculorum to switch on and off the Constitution.  Boudemiene at 2259. "

The Gelpí case has made some waves, because while it was generally accepted that PR is an "unincorporated" territory (even though the Constitution doesn't distinguish between "incorporated" and "unincorporated" territories, the Supreme Court, in the "Insular Cases", decided at the time that the court considered segregation constitutional, considered PR a territory), this is the first time a Federal court considers that PR has matured into an "incorporated" territory.

Clearly "states and territories" would cover every American jurisdiction but DC, and DC doesn't have a state-like government (headed by a Mayor) and doesn't have a Secretary of State. Pr4ever (talk) 01:35, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Most Federal statutes define a "state" as including DC and the territories precisely because of the difficulty in finding an all-encompassing term. Maybe we should adopt the same practical solution here.  It's kind of awkward not to find the names of DC, PR, VI, GU, AS and Northern Marianas' Secretaries of State in the SoS template, and creating a separate template would make life more difficult for students and other users of Wikipedia. Pr4ever (talk) 12:18, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Names of missing Secretaries of State
For a school project next week, I've already found the names of the governors from the United States possessions. Can any body direct me here to where I can find the names of their secretaries of state? Thank you.76.76.193.94 (talk) 03:34, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

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