As already noted, on August 2, a U.S. District Court struck down Utah procedures that didn’t permit a new party to get on the ballot in a special U.S. House election, unless the party had already been ballot-qualified when the election was called. According to this story, the state won’t appeal.

The decision will be somewhat helpful in other cases against early petition deadlines for new parties, both in special elections and also regular elections. It may also help persuade the Utah legislature that the petition deadline for new parties in regular elections (November 30 of the year before the election) is flawed and ought to be eased. The 2017 legislature moved that deadline from February of an election year, back to the year before the election. That Utah change was one of only two restrictive ballot access bills that passed in any state in 2017. The other bill that passed was a North Carolina bill that moved the independent petition deadline from June to April. Other restrictive bills that were introduced in 2017, but which failed to pass, were in Alaska, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, and New York.

This story by Jon Ward, for Yahoo News, says some U.S. political professionals are more interested now than in the past in the idea that independent candidates can win in the U.S. The story says they are inspired by the 2017 elections in France, where the nominee of a very new party was elected President. A few months later that same new party won a majority in the French parliament.

On August 2, the Maine legislature adjourned. The session had been the longest in Maine history. Only three election law bills passed in 2017. LD 1571 made minor improvements for minor parties seeking to get on the ballot and remain on. LD 297 raises the costs for candidates to seek a recount. LD 1384 made many small changes to the election law, including removing write-in space from the ballot unless a declared write-in candidate files. Governor Paul LePage had vetoed the latter two bills, but in each case the legislature overrode his veto.

Bills that failed to become law would have done these things: install a top-two system; let independent voters vote in primaries without joining a party at the polls on primary election day; change the law on ranked choice voting; ban paying petitioners per signature; require statewide initiative petitions to collect a certain number of signatures in each US House district; cut back public funding; remove partisan labels from the ballot for candidates who use the independent petition procedure; and remove the requirement that five sample ballots be posted at each polling place (the bill lowered that to just one sample ballot per polling place). That latter bill, LD 1058, had passed the legislature but the Governor vetoed it and his veto was sustained.