At the September 12 Green Party primary in Albany, New York, one candidate has 17 votes and the other has 15, although not all ballots have been tabulated so far. See this story.
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Huffington Post has this article by Harry Kresky and Tiani Coleman, urging that the government exert more control over political parties. The analysis simply assumes that the voters are never going to replace either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party with a new major party. The analysis therefore assumes that the only hope for more democratic control over the government is to force those two parties to be more internally democratic.
The article would be better if it mentioned the fact that voters in France this year formed a new party, and then put it into power. Similar events have happened in Canadian provincial elections, and in many Latin American countries. The United States signed the Helsinki Accords, and all the nations that signed pledged that they would not merge any political party with the government.
A group in Massachusetts has begun the preliminary steps to circulate an initiative, for a law that would require presidential candidates to reveal their income tax returns. The group presumably will abandon its plans if the Massachusetts legislature passes the same idea. The legislature is in session and has already held a hearing on that bill, SB 365. See this story.
The initiative first needs the signatures of 2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote, which is 64,750 signatures, by December 6. Then the legislature gets some more time to consider the idea. If the legislature doesn’t pass it, then initiative proponents must get another 10,792 signatures, and if they succeed, the measure would be on the November 2018 ballot.
On September 13, the Michigan legislature passed HB 4892. It allows candidates to get on the ballot in local 2017 elections, in instances when election officials had given erroneous information to the candidates about the deadline. No one voted against the bill in the Senate.
On the evening of September 12, the U.S. Supreme Court countermanded two rulings of lower federal courts in Texas, and said that Texas need not draw new districts in time for the 2018 election. One case involved U.S. House districts; the other state house districts. See this Scotusblog post. The vote was 5-4.