Candidates for Congress who raised or spent at least $5,000 so far are required to file with the Federal Election Commission, showing their contributors and expenditures. The quarterly candidate reports for the first three months of 2012 were due on April 15. The FEC staff is working to upload the data, and should be done within the next week, at least for U.S. House candidates. If a U.S. House candidate filed electronically, his or her report is already available. Here is the link for anyone to see a candidate’s statement. One may search for a particular candidate, or a particular race, or all the races in any particular state.

On April 17, two Republican legislators in Ohio asked the Ohio Supreme Court to un-do a consent decree that the state signed several years ago, promising not to enforce certain state laws that make it difficult for provisional ballots to be considered valid. See this story.

On April 17, the Wisconsin State Board of Elections (which is formally named the Government Accountability Board) ruled unanimously that it has no authority to remove candidates from the upcoming Democratic primaries, in the special gubernatorial and legislative recall elections, just because those candidates aren’t loyal to the Democratic Party.

Some individuals are running in the Democratic legislative recall primaries because, by guaranteeing that there are at least two Democrats running, the state must hold a Democratic primary, and that has the indirect effect of postponing the election itself from May to June. These individuals, from all the evidence, are partisan Republicans, and the Republican Party doesn’t want the special legislative elections to be in May; instead they want them in June, at the same time as the gubernatorial recall special election.

But, Wisconsin has had an open primary since 1907, and has never had voter registration by party. See this story.