Maine requires a ballot-qualified party to hold at least one municipal caucus in each of the 16 counties of the state, in the spring of each even-numbered year. Independent Maine representative Ben Chipman, who is closely associated with the Green Party, earlier this year introduced LD 142, to change the requirement so that parties are only obliged to hold caucuses within any 12 counties, instead of all 16. The bill passed the Joint Committee on State and Local Government last month, but it has been stalled ever since. This Portland Daily Sun story describes the bill and the trouble that it is having.

Maine is the only state that requires a political party to have organizations within every county. In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Eu v San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee that states cannot tell parties how to be organized. Specifically, the co-plaintiff Libertarian Party of California in that case was granted the freedom to organize itself on a regional basis (the party created its own regions), and to be free of a state election law that required organization on a county basis.

Wyoming lets a petition to recognize a new party start circulating on April 1 of the odd year before the election. The petition is due on June 1 of the election year, so the state allows 14 months. The Constitution Party has never before qualified as a party in Wyoming, but it is determined to be on in 2012, and started on the first possible date. It now has 200 signatures toward the requirement of 3,734 valid signatures.

On April 13, the Oklahoma House Rules Committee completely revamped SB 602, which had already passed the Senate. The original bill moved the primary from July to June, and moved the petition deadline for new parties from May 1 to March 1.

As amended, the bill moves the primary from July to the last Tuesday in August. It also eliminates the runoff primary. It is likely that the motivation for the amendment is concern that the original bill, setting the new party petition so early, would cause the state’s procedure for new parties to get on the ballot to be held unconstitutional.

The part of the bill abolishing the runoff primary would be a dramatic change for Oklahoma, which has had runoff primaries ever since 1946. State legislators for decades have resisted the idea of a abolishing the run-off primary. But, faced with a choice between eliminating the runoff primary, or putting the state in peril of having its ballot access law declared unconstitutional, the Rules Committee made the former choice. It will be interesting to see how the full House, and the Senate, feel about abolishing the runoff. Oklahoma must do something different because the federal law, requiring that overseas absentee ballots be mailed at least 45 days before an election, makes the existing system unworkable.

One would think that because the bill moves the primary to late August, the bill would also move the deadline for a new party to get on the ballot from May 1 to May 31, but the bill does not do that. If this bill passes, it it somewhat plausible that the May 1 petition deadline would be held unconstitutional. Before 2003, Oklahoma primaries were in late August and the new party petition deadline was May 31. Because this bill proposes returning to a late August primary, one wonders why the bill doesn’t also return the petition deadline to May 31. Ever since the deadline has been May 1, no new party petition has succeeded in Oklahoma.

Like several other bills pending in the Oklahoma legislature, this bill moves the presidential primary from February to March. The date of the presidential primary has no impact on petition deadlines. Oklahoma has never required a new party to participate in a presidential primary.

The Oklahoman, the state’s largest newspaper, had editorialized on April 12 that the run-off primary should be eliminated.