California Assemblymember Richard Gordon expects the Assembly to vote on AB 2351 on Thursday, May 15. This is the bill to re-define “political party”. It moves the vote test (2% for any statewide office, in a midterm year) from the general election to the primary election. It also eases the alternate registration test for a party to be ballot-qualified, from 1% of the last gubernatorial vote (currently 103,004 registrants) to .33% of the total number of registered voters (currently 58,280 registrants).

On May 6, Robert Davis, an elected member of the Highland Park, Michigan, School Board, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court. His complaint says that because he is planning to run for re-election in November 2014, and because he must submit a petition to get on the ballot, he is being injured by the Michigan law that won’t let unregistered voters circulate candidate petitions. The case is Davis v Johnson, eastern district, 2:14cv-11818.

The Complaint does not mention Congressman John Conyers, but the press and other observers assume that Davis filed the lawsuit to assist Conyers. If Davis wins his case, that would invalidate the law that threatens to keep Conyers off the Democratic primary ballot. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this information. See this story.

On May 9, an Onondaga County, New York trial court ruled that the petitions to put Congressman Dan Maffei on the Working Families Party primary ballot are valid. The challengers had argued that the signatures were collected by someone who was not a bona fide resident of New York state, but was really a Georgia resident who had temporarily registered to vote in New York state. See this article.

Congressman Maffei, a Democrat running for re-election, seeks the Working Families nomination as well as the Democratic Party’s nomination.