California Assembly Member Kevin Mullin has introduced AB 84, to move the California primary for all office to March, in presidential years. See this story. The bill, if enacted, would have consequences for the top-two system. A system in presidential years in which all candidates for Congress and partisan state office would need to file in the year before the election would very likely be unconstitutional.

Mullin is Speaker Pro Tempore, which is the second-highest position in the California Assembly, after the Speaker.

North Dakota Representative Corey Mock has introduced a bill to make it easier for parties to nominate candidates. Currently North Dakota is the only state that says a ballot-qualified party can’t nominate unless a certain minimum number of votes choose to vote in that party’s primary. Other states that had such laws in the past have repealed them. The bill number hasn’t been assigned yet.

Because of the current North Dakota restriction, no minor party candidates for the legislature have been on the November ballot since 1976. The current law requires only 300 primary votes for statewide candidates, and normally any party has that many voters in its primary, and statewide candidates therefore do qualify for the general election. But for legislature, the current law requires approximately 120 primary voters within that district to choose that party’s primary ballot. North Dakota legislative districts have such low populations, this means approximately 10% to 15% of all the primary voters in that district must choose the minor party’s primary ballot, which is not realistic. North Dakota has open primaries and all voters on primary day are free to choose any party’s primary ballot.

The bill also slightly changes the number of signatures needed for a new party to qualify. Current law requires exactly 7,000 signatures. The bill changes this to 1% of the state’s population at the last sentence. If the bill were enacted, the requirement would be 6,745 signatures.

On January 5, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan held oral argument in Level the Playing Field v Federal Election Commission, 1:15cv-1397. The issue is whether the FEC has a duty to determine whether the Commission on Presidential Debates is breaking federal campaign finance law when it lets the Commission spend corporate-donated money on the general election presidential debates. UPDATE: here is a news story about the hearing.

Judge Chutkan said that it appears the FEC did not evaluate the voluminous evidence presented to it that the Commission is, indeed, in a realistic sense, contributing to the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. She asked the attorney for the FEC how she could defer to the FEC when it appears the FEC hasn’t done a real analysis.