State legislators in 2011 are likely to consider bills in some states to move, or in some cases, to abolish presidential primaries.  Florida law currently requires a January presidential primary, but the two major parties don’t recognize the results.  See this story that tries to predict whether the legislature will move it to a later date or not.

In Washington, Governor Christine Gregoire has proposed abolishing the presidential primary, to save $10,000,000.  In California, where the law requires a February presidential primary and a June primary for congress and state office, the legislature is likely to merge the two primaries to save money.

Briefs filed with the Alaska Supreme Court in Miller v Treadwell reveal that 1,553 voters in the Alaska U.S. Senate race wrote in “Lisa Murkowski” but didn’t fill in the oval next to the name written in.  The Alaska Elections Division did not count these votes for Murkowski.  However, Murkowski’s attorneys are arguing that they should have been counted.

It appears that Murkowski doesn’t need those 1,553 votes, because the Division of Elections did recognize her write-in vote total as being 101,088, whereas Joe Miller’s vote total is 90,740 (plus 20 votes in which the voter cast a write-in for Joe Miller).  The Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in this case on Friday, December 17, and it seems likely the decision will rule on the validity of write-in votes in which the voter forgot, or didn’t know, to fill in the oval.  Murkowski’s attorneys argue that the Alaska Supreme Court already ruled in 1978 that such write-ins should be counted, although the 1978 ruling involved punchcard ballots.  In recent years, state courts in Washington and Colorado have ruled that such write-ins must be counted, by California courts ruled that they should not be counted.

Rick Hasen’s ElectionLawBlog has links to all the briefs in Miller v Treadwell here.

Oklahoma Representative Charles Key will again introduce a bill to lower the number of signatures for a party to appear on the ballot.  In the 2009 session, the Keys bill passed both houses of the legislature, but because each house passed a different version, and because the conference committee never reconciled the two versions, the bill did not pass.

The existing law, which requires a petition signed by voters equal in number to 5% of the last vote cast, is so severe, no one has completed it since 2000.  As a result, no voter in Oklahoma has been allowed to vote for any presidential candidate in November, other than the Democratic and Republican nominees, since 2000.  Oklahoma does not permit write-in votes.  The independent presidential petition procedure is also very harsh and has not been used since 1992.

Representative Key is a Republican from the Oklahoma City area, and is a committee chairman.  The 2011-2012 session of the legislature is the last session in which Key may sit, due to Oklahoma’s legislative term limits law.