On February 27, the Virginia legislature passed HB 1103, which lets localities use ranked choice voting for their own officers if they wish.
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On March 5, the Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to require the state to restore the straight-ticket device. The legislature had repealed it in 2018, effective 2020. Bruni v Hughs, s.d., 5:20cv-35. Here is the Complaint. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo, an Obama appointee.
The only precedent for this issue is from Michigan. After the legislature repealed the straight-ticket device, the Democratic Party sued to retain it. A U.S. District Court agreed with the Democratic Party, but the Sixth Circuit reversed, and said nothing in the U.S. Constitution requires a state to have a straight-ticket device.
Later, though, Michigan voters passed an initiative, which restored the straight-ticket device and made several other unrelated election law changes. Therefore Michigan still has a straight-ticket device, even though the courts said Michigan was free to abolish it if it wished to.
On March 4, the Maine Libertarian Party filed this request for injunctive relief in Baines v Dunlap, 1:19cv-509. Last year the Libertarian Party filed this case against Maine election laws that (1) force it to qualify as a party in January of an election year; (2) automatically erase all of a party’s registered members when it goes off the ballot, which it did in November 2018; (3) forces newly-qualifying parties to nominate by primary and makes it virtually impossible for a member of a newly-qualifying party to get on his or her own party’s primary ballot.
The brief points out that even the Maine Green Party, with 43,143 registered members, was unable to place its 2020 US Senate candidate, Lisa Savage, on the party’s primary ballot, because the law requires 2,000 signatures of party members and they are scattered around the state. That makes it virtually impossible to complete such a petition, for a party of that size.
The Joplin Globe has this editorial, urging the Missouri legislature to keep the open primary. A bill is pending to change Missouri to a closed primary state.
On March 5, the Initiative & Referendum Institute, and the Center for Competitive Democracy, filed this amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Schmitt v LaRose, 19-974. The amicus lists each state that has the initiative, and tells how many initiatives have been enacted in each of those states. It singles out significant initiatives that passed.