Texas is the only state that won’t let people sign petitions for newly-qualifying parties or independent candidates if they voted in the primaries. The Texas primaries for all office were on Tuesday, March 5. Although not all votes have been counted, it appears that only about 3,300,000 people voted in either the Democratic or Republican primaries.

By contrast, in the 2020 presidential primaries, approximately 4,200,000 Texans voted. In 2016, approximately 4,300,000 Texans voted. So ballot access this year will be somewhat easier than in 2020 and 2016. The only two petitions likely to come close to succeeding in Texas are petitions to create the No Labels Party and the Texas Independent Party. The Texas Independent Party backs Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Each petition needs 81,030 signatures. Petitioning cannot begin until March 12, and the deadline is May 28.

The Libertarian and Green Parties are ballot-qualified in Texas.

On February 27, Democratic presidential candidate Cenk Uygur dropped his appeal of his South Carolina ballot access case. It had been pending in the Fourth Circuit. Uygur v South Carolina and McMaster, 24-1052.

Uygur was born in Turkey. He was kept off the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary because he is not a natural born citizen. He had argued that the portion of Article II, setting out the national-born qualification, was no longer in force because the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause had superceded it.

California has two U.S. Senate races on the ballot this year. They are both for the same seat. One race is for the two-and-one-half momth term from election day to January 2025. The other is the full, normal six-year term.

For some reason, the leading Republican in both races has more votes than anyone else for the short term, but not the regular term. In the short term race, Garvey has 1,317,911 votes, whereas Adam B. Schiff, the leading Democrat, has 1,173,917. Of course there are millions of votes left to count, so this may change.