Joe Mathews has this opinion piece in Fox & Hounds, commenting on John Wildemuth’s earlier piece about why top-two systems are desirable. Both Mathews and Wildemuth are California journalists and writers. Thanks to Rob Richie for the link.
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On April 8, the Montana Senate passed HB 120, the Secretary of State’s omnibus election law bill which contains two ballot access improvements. But because other parts of the bill had been amended in the Senate, the bill must now return to the House. The two ballot access improvements are: (1) moving the independent non-presidential petition deadline from March to May; (2) letting independent presidential and vice-presidential candidates appear on the ballot even if they had been closely associated with a political party during the recent period.
Dan Winslow, a Republican candidate in the special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, has asked the Federal Election Commission whether he can accept a contribution of $5,200 from a Massachusetts married same-sex couple. If the couple were of opposite sex, this contribution would be legal. See this story. Thanks to the Center for Competitive Politics for the link.
On April 1, the California Assembly Elections Committee introduced AB 1419, which improves the deadline for a newly-qualifying party to qualify. Current law says a newly-qualifying party must finish the work of getting on the ballot by the first week in January of an election year. The bill would set forth a procedure by which a newly-qualifying party that only wanted to participate in the presidential election could qualify by early July. The bill exists because the old deadline, as least as applied to presidential elections, was held unconstitutional last year.
The Nation has this article by Russell Mokhiber. The article advocates that Nation readers think seriously about running for state legislative seats. To encourage this, the article tells the story of Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins, a 24-year-old Democrat who was elected to the Alaska legislature in 2012, in a district in which the incumbent had been perceived by observers as someone who could not be defeated. The larger point of Mokhiber’s piece is to emphasize how many legislative districts there are with those characteristics around the U.S., and to encourage activists to run to win. A few of the facts in the article originated with data first published in Ballot Access News.