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.

On March 30, U.S. District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs, an Obama appointee, turned aside the Republican Party lawsuit against South Carolina’s open primary as applied to the Republican Party. The outcome was not too surprising, because South Carolina is in the 4th circuit, and the 4th circuit ruled earlier in a Virginia case that if a party has a choice of whether to nominate by primary or convention, and it chooses a primary, it must follow the state election law on who can participate. Like Virginia, South Carolina lets all parties decide whether to nominate by primary or convention.

However, the Republican Party had also argued that it isn’t truly free to choose to nominate by primary, because another state law says the party can’t nominate by convention unless 3/4ths of the delegates agree. However, the judge upheld the 3/4ths law as well. Here is the 25-page decision. The name of the case is The Greenville County Republican Party v State of South Carolina, 6:10-cv-1407. Thanks to Harry Kresky for the link.