As reported earlier, no candidates qualified to have their names on the Flint, Michigan ballot this year for Mayor and City Council. This is because the city clerk erroneously told candidates that the deadline was a week later than the actual deadline. The non-partisan primary is in August and the run-off is in November. No August primary would be held if no candidates qualified. Instead, the Mayor and City Councilmembers in the two districts that are up this year would be chosen by write-in votes in November.

However, bills to allow candidates to be on this year’s ballot are moving through the Michigan legislature. On May 27 the House Elections Committee passed HB 4589 and SB 329, identical bills which say late candidates can be on the ballot when the city misinformed candidates, but only for 2015 elections. The Senate had already passed SB 329. The House Committee amended the bill to specify extra training for city officials.

The state has told local officials not to print any ballots until June 5, to see if the bill passes.

On May 29, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed SB 8, the bill that moves the primary for all office in 2016 from late May to early March, and which moves the petition deadline for new parties to September 2015 and the non-presidential independent deadline to November 2015. The bill also forces new parties to have chosen all their 2016 nominees no later than November 2015. It is possible the Libertarian Party will sue over the deadline for it to have chosen all its nominees.

There has never before been any state that forced new parties to nominate all their nominees for a November even-numbered election an entire year before the election. New parties in Arkansas nominate by convention.

On May 29, Tyson Parker filed a notice of appeal in Parker v Duran, the lawsuit over the number of signatures needed for an independent candidate in New Mexico. Parker was an incumbent member of the Public Education Commission, a partisan elected office. He tried to run for re-election in 2014 but since he was an independent, he needed the signatures of 2,196 voters in his district. If he had been running as the nominee of one of New Mexico’s four ballot-qualified parties, he only would have needed 732 signatures. He submitted 1,379 signatures, not enough to meet the independent requirement.

He argued in court that the Constitution does not permit New Mexico to require three times as many signatures for an independent as for a minor party nominee, but the U.S. District Court upheld the law.