On March 5, Maine State Senator Roger Katz (R-Augusta) introduced LD 744, to let independent voters vote in any party’s primary ballot. The bill has nine co-sponsors and is pending in the Joint Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs. Here is a copy of the bill, which is only three sentences long. The bill does not say that independent voters can sign a petition to get a candidate on a primary ballot.

Other states that tell parties they must let independents vote in their primaries, even if those independents don’t join the party on primary day, include Arizona, Massachusetts, and Nebraska. Currently, any Maine voter can join a qualified party on primary election day and vote in its primary. Thanks to Thomas MacMillan for the news.

Early in morning of April 3, during the last few hours of the 2015 Arizona legislative session, the State Senate again defeated SCR 1001, the bill to ask voters in November 2016 if they wish to end the campaign funding program. See this story. The bill had almost passed on March 11, and another vote had been called for. The April 3 vote was 29 in favor and 27 opposed, but it failed because bills in the Senate need at least 31 votes.

According to this story, the Greenville, South Carolina, city council will vote on April 6 whether to convert the city’s elections back from non-partisan to partisan elections.

If the city council does reinstate partisan city elections, the Greenville County Republican Party will once more be able to sue over state law that says parties must pay for open primaries in municipal partisan elections. The 4th circuit last month rejected the party’s lawsuit because Greenville had switched to non-partisan city elections last year. The 4th circuit said it was unlikely that the city would reinstate partisan elections. But, that might have been an error.