On January 31, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee passed SB 62. It provides that voter registration forms should ask for a political party selection. The bill also says that parties would then be free to decide whether to let all voters vote in its primaries, or just members of the party, or just members of the party and independents, or just voters who didn’t vote in the primary of any other party. Under existing law, the voter registration form doesn’t ask the voter to choose a party, and any voter is free to vote in any party’s primary.

The bill would not permit voters to register into an unqualified party. However, the bill is vague as to whether the voter would write in the name of a party on a blank space, or whether the form would have checkboxes for the qualified parties.

The vote in Committee was 8-7.

The North Dakota Libertarian Party has decided ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its ballot access appeal. The 8th circuit had upheld the law, which requires a party that wants to have legislative candidates on the November ballot to persuade between 10% and 15% of all primary voters to choose that minor party’s primary ballot.

The law is so severe, no minor party nominee for state legislature has been on the North Dakota general election ballot since 1976.

The 8th circuit opinion is factually flawed. The opinion said that the primary vote test is the only ballot access barrier for minor parties, and that once a party submits its original ballot access petition of 15,000 signatures, it may stay on the ballot forever. This is utterly untrue. But when the factual error was pointed out to the 8th circuit in a request for a rehearing, the 8th circuit denied the request without comment.

According to this story, Howard Hawk, Presiding Circuit Judge for Marshall County, Alabama, will run for re-election this year as an independent candidate. Alabama elects its state judges in partisan elections. Hawk filed for the Republican primary but the county party rejected him. Alabama law lets political parties block candidates from running in their primaries for any reason. Republican legislative leaders had welcomed Hawk into the Republican Party, but the Marshall County Republican Party distrusts him because he was a Democrat until mid-2011. Alabama does not have registration by party, and has open primaries.