On March 15, the Tennessee Senate State and Local Government passed SB 935, which makes slight improvements to ballot access for minor parties. It moves the petition deadline for the petition to qualify a new party from March to early April, and deletes the requirement that says the petition says signers are members of the party. See this story. The bill does not lower the number of signatures, 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote. For 2012 and 2014, this would be 40,042 valid signatures. The story is wrong to say the bill requires 60,000 signatures.

The story’s author asserts that the bill cures the constitutional defects in Tennessee’s procedure to get a new party on the ballot, but the author is mistaken. The September 2010 decision of a U.S. District Court, invalidating the existing law, emphasized that a petition deadline four months before the primary is unconstitutional, but the bill’s deadline would still be four months before the August primary. Read the part of the decision on pages 33 through 37.