Indpana State Senator Mike Gaskill (R-Pendleton), author of Senate Bill 201, has abandoned his bill even though it had passed the Senate Elections Committee on February 3. His bill would have converted Indiana from an open primary state to a closed primary state.
The February 23 issue of the New York Times has this story on the lack of competition in U.S. House elections and especially U.S. state legislative elections.
On February 18, the New Hampshire House Election Law Committee defeated HB 172. It would have prohibited independent voters from voting in partisan primaries.
B.A.N. had already reported that Joseph Bishop-Henchman had obtained copies of Washington, D.C. presidential write-in ballots from November 2024, and had tabulated the results. The D.C. Board of Elections refused to tally these write-ins, even for declared write-in candidates.
Now a second individual has also obtained the ballots and counted them. He is Desmond Silveira, and his figures have been published in Medium, an on-line publishing platform. See his article here. He found slightly more write-ins than Bishop-Henchman had found. For the presidential candidates who were actually on the ballot in at least one other state, here are the Silveira totals: Jill Stein 2,259; Claudia De la Cruz 472; Cornel West 472; Chase Oliver 208; Peter Sonski 130; Shiva Ayyadurai 7; Randall Terry 5; Vermin Supreme 3.
On February 19, the New Mexico State Senate passed SB 16, which lets independent voters vote in a partisan primary.
