The Wisconsin legislature is currently considering SB 116, a bill with the major purpose of moving the primary (for office other than President) from the first Tuesday in September to the first Tuesday in August. Unfortunately, the bill also moves the petition deadline for a new party from June 1 to April 1. And the bill does not relax the current requirement that makes it illegal to circulate this petition in an odd year. Therefore, if the bill passes in its current form, the petition for circulating this petition would shrink from five months to three months. Furthermore, that petitioning period would be almost entirely in winter, when weather can inhibit petitioning.

The bill has passed the Senate, but has been amended in the Assembly. The Assembly will probably pass it next week and then it returns to the Senate for another vote.

The National Popular Vote Plan leaders in South Dakota now say they will not try to put an initiative on the 2012 ballot, asking voters if they wish South Dakota to join the Plan. See this story. Some months ago, it had appeared likely that such an initiative would be on the ballot in South Dakota.

Ballotpedia has this very useful analysis of the regularly-scheduled state legislative elections. The study finds that in 42.6% of the races, only one major party candidate is running in the general election. This is even worse than the norm in even-numbered election years, when many more states hold regularly-scheduled legislative elections. Generally, in even-numbered years, between 32% and 37% of the races have only one major party person running.

Because there are relatively few minor party and independent candidates, this means that most voters this year have only one choice on general election ballots for state legislature. Legislatures dominated by Republicans and Democrats pass laws that make it very easy for members of those two parties to run for office, and (in many cases) very difficult for anyone else to run. Then, the two major parties, having achieved near-monopoly status for themselves, do not even use their guaranteed spots on the ballot to recruit and run nominees much of the time. And yet courts continually uphold restrictive ballot access laws under the theory that without those laws, the ballots will be too crowded.