In over half the states, leading major party presidential candidates can get on primary ballots with no petition at all. Either they are put on automatically because they are mentioned in news media, or because they raised enough money to qualify for primary season matching funds (whether they actually apply or not).

But in Indiana, all candidates need 4,500 signatures. This story quotes Brad King, Co-Director of the Indiana Election Commission, about the work needed to check the signatures on these petitions. King says, “The counties are busily processing the petition tsunami, as I’ve called it. It’s a huge amount of paperwork that they are asked to process in a limited amount of time.”

It is likely that when the deadline passes, ten Republicans and four Democrats will have filed. Jeb Bush has already filed, and his campaign says it submitted 9,000 signatures. If fourteen candidates each submit 9,000 signatures, that will be 126,000 signatures to check. Indiana does not have the statewide initiative process, so Indiana election officials are not accustomed to checking so many petitions. Minor party and independent candidates need 26,700 valid signatures. No statewide independent or minor party candidate has submitted a petition in Indiana since 2000, so election officials haven’t had to check that type of petitions.

Two Tennessee legislators have introduced bills that amend the election code. The bills prohibit the Secretary of State from placing any presidential candidate on the general election ballot if the candidate is not a natural-born citizen. Here is the text of SB 2625. The other bill, HB 2595, is identical. The sponsors are two Democrats from Nashville, Senator Jeff Yarbro and Representative Jason Powell.

On January 21, proponents of a top-two system for Arizona filed the text of their initiative. It is almost identical to the proposal submitted by the same people in 2012, which was defeated 662,366 to 1,340,286. However, it does say that if only one or two candidates file for the August primary (for an office that elects one person), the August primary will omit that office from the ballot, and the first vote for that office will be in November. It allows write-in votes in both August and November.

Earlier press reports had said the proponents would delete party labels from the primary and general election ballots, but the text does not eliminate party labels. The text says that the party label printed on the ballots must match the partisan registration of the candidate. The text does not make it clear whether that includes labels which are not the names of qualified parties. Anyone is free to register into any group on Arizona voter registration forms, on the blank line for “party.” If the proponents wished to allow any partisan label without restriction, it seems they would have set a limit on how long that label can be, as Washington state does.

The proposal makes no changes to the presidential primary or the presidential general election. The summary of the initiative implies that under current law, some voters are not able to vote in some primaries. Actually, existing law already guarantees that independents can vote in any partisan primary other than the presidential primary. Anyone who reads the summary would probably be led to believe that if the initiative passed, independents could vote in Arizona presidential primaries, but that would not be true.