On April 9, the Hawaii Senate defeated HB 712 by 10-15. This is the bill to require presidential candidates, and candidates for a few other offices, to reveal their income tax returns.
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The backers of the proposed Ohio initiative for the national popular vote pact have decided not to try to qualify their initiative. See this story. Thanks to Steve Kamp for the link.
California Assemblymember Evan Low (D-Campbell) has introduced AB 1451. It requires that at least 10% of the signatures on a statewide initiative petition must be collected by unpaid individuals. It also bans paying circulators on a per-signature basis. Here is the text.
The League of Women Voters of California opposes this bill. It has a hearing in the Assembly Elections Committee on Wednesday, April 10, at 9 a.m.
Several bills like this one were vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown in the past, but he is not Governor any longer.
On April 5, both sides notified a U.S. District Court that they have settled the lawsuit Crookston v Benson, w.d., 1:16cv-1109. The case concerns Michigan’s ban on photographing one’s own voted ballot. It seems likely that the state no longer wishes to defend this law. See this story.
The case had been filed in 2016 by a voter who had taken a photo of his own voted ballot in 2012. He was warned that he had violated the law, although he was not prosecuted. The voter won injunctive relief on October 24, 2016, but then four days later the Sixth Circuit had reversed that injunctive relief.
Michigan had a Republican Secretary of State until November 2018, when the voters replaced her with a Democrat. Several election lawsuits in Michigan are now being handled differently, seemingly as a result of different policies by the new Secretary of State. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
This story says that the Maryland legislature is about to adjourn for the year, without passing a bill to redraw U.S. House district boundaries. If the legislature did redraw the boundaries of the Sixth District, that might cause the U.S. Supreme Court to then rule that the pending lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court, Benisek v Lamone, is moot.