Bill Crawford, a writer for the Mississippi Business Journal, predicts in this column that the legislature will pass a bill letting parties close their primaries. The Mississippi Business Journal is a weekly print publication and is on-line also, and is published in Jackson.

The Mississippi legislature customarily meets in the first three months of every calendar year. Changing the system in 2015 would be awkward, because Mississippi elects all its state officers in years before presidential election years, so 2015 is state election year in that state.

All of the statewide Illinois petitions submitted for the general election this year have been challenged. The independent candidates for Governor and U.S. Senator will certainly be removed from the ballot, because none of them had as many signatures as the legal requirement, 25,000. The three statewide minor party petitions all have over 25,000, however, so the challenge process will be grueling.

The Libertarian statewide petition has somewhat more than 43,000 signatures; the Constitution Party petition has almost 31,000; the Green Party petition has almost 30,000.

On June 23, a lower state court in Illinois removed both initiatives from the ballot. See this story. One initiative would impose legislative term limits; the other would set up a redistricting commission.

Everyone agrees that the term limits has enough valid signatures, but whether the redistricting initiative has enough valid signatures is still contested. But the court ruling related to whether initiatives on those two subjects are even possible under the Illinois Constitution, which does not permit statewide initiatives unless they relate to the legislature. The decision on the term limits initiative will be quickly appealed to the State Supreme Court. The redistricting initiative proponents concede their proposal won’t be on the 2014 ballot.