New Hampshire Representative Steven Smith (R-Charlestown) will introduce a bill to ease ballot access for independent candidates and minor parties. The legislature won’t be in session until 2014, but legislators can introduce bill drafts at any time, and Smith is submitting his proposal this week.

New Hampshire has not had a ballot-qualified party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, since November 1996. The only other states that have not had a ballot-qualified third party during the entire period since 1996 are New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Yet New Hammpshire holds itself out to the nation as a state that is one of the most civic-minded and democratic states in the nation, and then uses that assertion to bolster its claim to permanently have the nation’s earliest presidential primary. Thanks to Darryl Perry for the news about Representative Smith.

On September 26, the Tenth Circuit held an oral argument in Riddle v Hickenlooper, 13-1108. The hearing went well for the plaintiffs. The issue is whether a state can permit individuals to give $400 to legislative candidates nominated in primaries, but only $200 to legislative candidates who were nominated in minor party conventions, or by petition, or who are write-in candidates. The U.S. District Court had upheld the law. The three judges are Neal Gorsuch, Bobby Baldock, and Robert Bacharach. None of them had previously had a case involving minor party or independent candidates.

The Intelligencer Journal, daily newspaper of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has this story about Pennsylvania ballot access. The story does not mention that Lancaster’s State Senator, Senator Lloyd Smucker, is refusing to hold a committee hearing on the bill. But perhaps this article will help to persuade Senator Smucker to hold a hearing. The Intelligencer Journal is the nation’s seventh-oldest newspaper.