On April 14, the Washington state legislature passed SB 5171, which moves the primary for all office from late August to the first Tuesday in August. The deadline for candidates to file in that primary in 2012 (assuming the Governor signs the bill) will be May 18.

One of the disadvantages of top-two systems is that they close off all routes to the November ballot very early, because they do not provide any means for anyone to be on the November ballot unless that person has run in a primary. Thus, no one will be able to enter a Washington state partisan election beyond mid-May (except as a write-in candidate), almost six months before the election itself. Before 1977, Washington state had a route to the November ballot as late as mid-September.

Florida HB 1355, passed by the House on April 21, is 157 pages long. Among the changes is a provision that does not permit political parties to nominate anyone for any partisan office (other than president or presidential elector), if that person had been a registered member of another political party at any time during the year before filing to run for office.

The bill makes no exception for new parties. Therefore, a new party, formed in an election year, would not be permitted to have any nominees who had been members of another party for 18 months before the election. This part of the bill, if signed into law, would almost certainly be held unconstitutional. Similar laws in Oklahoma and Nevada were invalidated, as applied to new parties. The Oklahoma case was Crussel v Oklahoma State Election Board, 497 F Supp 646 (1980); the Nevada case was Long v Swackhamer, 538 P 2d 587 (1975). If a law like this had been in effect in 1854, the Republican Party would have been severely handicapped, because a great deal of Republicans elected that year had been Whigs or Democrats or Free Soilers immediately before the Republican Party was formed.

Courts in New Mexico and Colorado have ruled that it is unconstitutional for a state to tell a party that it can’t nominate a non-member. The Colorado case was Colorado Democratic Party v Meyer (1988); the New Mexico case was Woodruff v Herrera (2011).

On April 21, Americans Elect submitted the paperwork to qualify as a political party in Florida. This is an action Americans Elect would have been doing in Florida eventually, in any case. However, the filing was done earlier than it would have been otherwise. If HB 1355 is signed into law and Americans Elect (or possibly other parties as well) brings a lawsuit against the new law, it may be legally advantageous that Americans Elect had already been qualified, when the new, drastic ballot access restriction took effect.