March 11 was the deadline for parties to submit a petition to be recognized in Arizona. This year the state requires 20,449 valid signatures. The Green Party is the only party that turned in a petition. That petition contained 29,015 signatures. UPDATE: the 29,015 figure is an updated and accurate total. When this post was originally put up earlier today, it said 26,000, but that was not accurate.

The Libertarian Party has not needed to submit a petition in Arizona since 1994, because it keeps its registration above two-thirds of 1% of the statewide registration total.

This 2010 Green Party petition is the first time since 1994 that any party has turned in a petition in Arizona in a mid-term year.

A proposed local ballot initiative is about to begin circulating in Portland, Maine, to let resident immigrants vote in city elections. See this story. Thanks to Thomas MacMillan for the link.

On March 9, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge John C. Coughenour issued a 10-page procedural order, generally letting the Washington Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian Parties amend their complaints, in the ongoing case against the “top-two” system that Washington has been using since 2008. Judge Coughenour did delete one part of the Republican Party’s complaint, which deals with whether top-two violates the state Constitution.

The order says, “Many of the new paragraphs at least obliquely bolster a claim for voter confusion – the substance of the as-applied challenge currently before the Court.”

Also important is footnote 2, which says that even though this Judge had ruled against the Libertarian Party’s ballot access and trademark arguments in his order of August 20, 2009, that “because of the parties’ continued ability to appeal those claims at least once, the Court would not under any circumstances require deletion of those claims from pleadings.”