On February 18, the New Hampshire House Election Law Committee defeated HB 172. It would have prohibited independent voters from voting in partisan primaries.
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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.
On February 13, the New Hampshire Senate Election Law Committee defeated SB 11. It would have let each U.S. House district choose its own presidential elector, in a manner similar to Nebraska and Maine.
Two identical bills in pending in Minnesota on the subject of special elections. HB 66 and SF 1020 require that independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties must be given at least seven days to complete their petitions. Although even seven days is a very short period, in recent special legislative elections, the Secretary of State (who now has the discretion to set the petitioning period in special elections) has actually proposed that in some elections, only one day is permitted.
Most special elections are legislative elections, and the petition for legislative independents is 500 signatures.