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 He had filed to run in the March 1980 Illinois presidential primary, and in April 1980 he had withdrawn from the Republican contest and declared as an independent.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.

The Greensboro, North Carolina News & Record has this editorial in its March 18 edition. The editorial expresses disappointment with the recent North Carolina Supreme Court decision upholding the state’s ballot access law for minor parties. It hopes that the legislature will reform the law. North Carolina requires 85,379 signatures for a new party, or a statewide independent candidate, to get on the 2012 ballot. Also, parties cannot get on the ballot in any part of the state, unless they get on statewide. And, North Carolina is one of the few states that won’t let voters register into unqualified parties.

It is notable that many of the state’s leading newspapers have a better grasp of the facts than the majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court did. The majority said the 85,379 requirement is necessary to prevent “frivolous and fraudulent” candidates from getting on the ballot. But there were no such parties on the North Carolina ballot during the years 1929 through 1981, when the state only required 10,000 signatures for minor parties. The requirement was not raised in order to stop ballot clutter, as the record in the lawsuit showed. The requirement was raised because legislators were upset that the Socialist Workers Party had qualified for the ballot in 1980, the first time that a Marxist political party had ever appeared on a government-printed ballot in North Carolina. The Supreme Court ignored an overwhelming amount of evidence in the case.