On March 1, the Kentucky House Elections, Constitutional Amendments, and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee defeated SB 41 by a vote of 5-4. This is the bill that provides that independent voters may vote in the primary of their choice. If the bill were to pass, Kentucky would then have a semi-closed primary. That is the term for a primary in which party members can only choose the primary ballot of the party they are registered into, but an independent may vote in any party’s primary. These terms have been defined in several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as political science books, such as “Voting at the Political Fault Line.” UPDATE: the vote was partisan, with all Republicans voting “Yes” but only one Democrat voting “Yes.” The Committee has six Democrats and four Republicans. Bills need a majority to pass, so the bill needed six votes. The vote was five “Yes”, two “No”, and three not voting. Not voting in Committee is the same as voting “No.”

Most reporters don’t know these definitions, so the stories about SB 41 refer to it as an open primary bill. An open primary is a primary in which all voters are permitted a free choice of which party’s primary ballot to choose.

Cayuga County, New York, elects 15 members to its County Legislature, on a partisan basis. The 15 districts are not similar to each other in population. Instead, the county has a system in which each member’s vote in the Legislature depends on how many constituents he or she has. The legislator with the most constituents casts 81 votes (called “points”) each time he votes; by comparison, the legislator with the fewest constituents casts 47 points.

Democrats in the Cayuga County legislature are suggesting that this system be ended, and that the districts be redrawn so that each district is approximately equal in population. See this story.

On February 28, the Nebraska legislature advanced LB 399, without opposition. This is the bill that eases the statewide non-presidential independent petition distribution requirement. Current law requires 50 signatures from each of 30 counties. In effect, this requires 30 separate petitions, all of which must succeed. The bill eliminates the county distribution requirement and substitutes a requirement that the petition must have 750 signatures from each of the three U.S. House districts.

The bill has no effect on the total number of signatures required, which is 4,000 signatures.

The legislature’s specific action on February 28 was to “advance the bill to enrollment and review for engrossment”, which in most states is called second reading.