On March 16, the U.S. House held a hearing on HR 3335, a bill to require the states to let ex-felons register to vote in federal elections. Here is a Florida newspaper story about the hearing, which emphasizes the point that the Supervisor of Elections of Leon County, Florida made. If this bill had been in effect before the 2000 election, thousands of Florida voters who were not permitted to vote, would have been permitted to vote, and the outcome of the presidential election would have almost certainly been different.

On March 16, the Tennessee House State & Local Government Committee amended HB 3060 to permit a candidate to file simultaneously as an independent candidate, and as a declared write-in candidate in a partisan primary for the same office.

If the candidate then lost the primary, he or she could still run as an independent candidate. See this story, which explains the motivation for the bill. The Speaker of the House is a Republican, but he is considered a traitor by his own party, because he became speaker with the votes of all the Democrats in the House, plus his own vote. As speaker, even though he is a Republican, he has appointed an equal number of committee chairs from each of the two major parties. The Republicans, in retaliation, had announced that he would not be allowed to file for re-election in the Republican primary this year. But if the bill is signed into law, he could be a write-in in the Republican primary. Since no other Republican has yet announced plans to run in his district, he could surely win a Republican primary as a write-in candidate. And if some other Republican does file for that primary, and defeat him, he can still run in that district as an independent.

Gene Waldorf, a former Democratic-Farmer-Labor State Senator in Minnesota, will run for U.S. House this year as an independent. Waldorf was in the State Senate from 1976 through 1992. He tried to ban most abortions. He will run in the 7th district, in northwest Minnesota. See this story.