On March 31, the Oklahoma Senate Rules Committee passed HB 1615. The bill has already passed the House. It moves the petition deadline for a new party to submit its petition from May 1 to March 1. It also moves the primary (for office other than President) from July to June. It even says that a new party cannot start its petition drive later than December 31 of the year before the election. This bill is clearly unconstitutional. An identical bill, SB 602, has passed the Senate and is pending in the House Rules Committee.

Meanwhile, the bill to lower the number of signatures for a new party, HB 1058, has passed the House but has not yet passed any Senate Committee. The deadline for it to pass the Senate Rules Committee is April 7.

On March 30, the Idaho Senate passed SB 1198, the bill to begin asking registered voters to choose a party. The bill also provides for separate primary ballots for each party. Members of one party could only choose that party’s primary ballot. Each political party would decide for itself whether to let independents vote in its primary. The vote was 28-7.

Idaho has four qualified parties. They all nominate by primary. However, elections officials don’t print up primary ballots for parties that have no contested primaries, and generally the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party don’t have contested primaries.

On November 2, 2010, the voters of Florida passed two redistricting reform measures, one for U.S. House districts and one for state legislative. They said that although the legislature would continue to draw the boundaries of these districts, the legislature was forbidden from drawing the boundaries for partisan advantage.

On March 30, the Florida legislature finally sent these measures to the U.S. Justice Department, Voting Rights Section, for pre-clearance. The Governor had refused to send them in, prompting a lawsuit. But then various units of state government decided that it was the legislature’s duty, not the Governor’s duty, to send them to the federal government, and that step has been taken. See this story.