Rhode Island General Laws

R.I. Gen. Laws § 17-12-8 (2026)

Qualifications and terms of committee members

✓ current as of July 2026
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(a) No member of a ward, town, or district committee shall hold or continue to hold membership on the ward, town, or district committee, unless that member is a qualified elector of the ward, town, or district.

(b) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter, ward, district, town, and city committee members shall hold office, respectively, from the date of their election until the next election of the committees, and thereafter until their successors has been duly elected, qualified, and organized.

(c) Candidates for ward, town, or district committee members shall file declarations of candidacy biennially, in every even year, in accordance with § 17-14-1.

Notes of Decisions
Cited in 3 cases, 1968–1982 · leading case: DeCesare v. Bd. of Elections, 242 A.2d 421 (R.I. 1968).
DeCesare v. Bd. of Elections, 242 A.2d 421 (R.I. 1968). · cites it 2× “The remaining question may be briefly *425 stated as follows: did the 59 candidates elected to the town committee at the September 13 primary constitute a legal entity of which it could be said that a vacancy therein existed within the meaning of § 17-12-12, supra? Public Laws…”
Lee v. Nielsen, 388 A.2d 1176 (R.I. 1978). “1956 (1969 Reenactment) §17-12-8, the incumbent Committee members hold office until their successors have been duly elected, qualified, and organized.”
Gosz v. Quattrocchi, 448 A.2d 135 (R.I. 1982). “It should also be noted that the persons selected by the state chairman to serve as members of the representative district committees will be subject to the party electoral process beginning with the primary election in 1982 in harmony with the provisions of G.”
Annotations are extracted automatically from the opinions in the Syfert caselaw corpus and ranked by authority, recency, and treatment. Dots show Syfertize treatment of the citing case itself.