Delaware has always permitted fusion, the ability of two different political parties to jointly nominate the same person. A bill to abolish fusion was passed by the Delaware House in January 2011. That bill, HB 11, will be heard in the Senate Administrative Services & Elections Committee during the week of March 21-25. The exact date hasn’t been set yet.

The bill is worded very broadly. It makes it illegal for a party to nominate a non-member. That prohibition is so broad, it seems to run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Tashjian v Republican Party of Connecticut, which said that if a state ever told a political party that it couldn’t nominate a non-member, that prohibition would violate the party’s associational rights.

Several minor political parties in Delaware are working against the bill.

On March 17, the Illinois House Election & Campaign Reform Committee passed HB 2009 unanimously. It says that anyone who ran in a primary, but who is not nominated, is then barred from running in the same election year as an independent nominee, or the nominee of another party, for any office. The bill also pertains to people who win their primary but then withdraw as the nominee of the party whose primary they had won.

This bill would have barred Scott Lee Cohen from running as an independent candidate in 2010 for Governor. He had won the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor in February 2010, but then had resigned that nomination. Then he had become an independent candidate for Governor and had polled 135,705 votes (3.64% of the total vote cast) in November. The bill would also have blocked John B. Anderson from running for President as an independent in 1980 in his own state, Illinois. He had filed to run in the March 1980 Illinois presidential primary, and in April 1980 he had withdrawn from the Republican contest and declared as an independent. He got on the ballot in November 1980 in all 50 states.

However, the bill liberalizes who can run in a partisan primary. Current law seems to bar anyone from running in a presidential primary if he or she voted in the primary of another party in the preceding year, or ran in the primary of another party in the preceding year. But HB 2009 deletes those restrictions.

The Maine legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on State and Local Government has passed LD 142 unanimously. Current law says a qualified party must hold county caucuses in every county in the spring of even-numbered years. The bill, as originally introduced, abolished this requirement. However, the bill has been amended, to say that a party must hold such county caucuses in at least twelve of Maine’s sixteen counties. The amended bill will be helpful, because it frees relatively small qualified parties from having to be organized in some of the smallest counties. Maine’s smallest-population county, Piscataquis, cast fewer than 10,000 votes for President in November 2010.