On June 4, Maine LD 1041 made some headway. The House passed it on First Reading on Consent. LD 1041 changes the way a party remains on the ballot. Existing law requires it to poll 5% for the office at the top of the ballot at either of the last two elections. The bill would change this. A party would remain on the ballot as long as it continued to have 10,000 registered members who vote in each general election.

The only ballot-qualified party in Maine besides the Democratic and Republican Parties is the Green Party, which has approximately 31,000 registered members. Three-fourths of them voted in the November 2008 election. If the bill passed, chances are overwhelming that the Green Party would remain a qualified party even if it didn’t run anyone for Governor in 2010.

LD 1041 does not change the method by which a group becomes a qualified party. If LD 1041 were to become law, it would still be true that a group could become a qualified party by sponsoring a candidate for Governor or President who then polled 5% of the vote. Alternatively, a group can become a qualified party if it submits a petition signed by 5% of the last gubernatorial vote.

The June 3 issue of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Post-Gazette has this article about new revelations in the ongoing investigation of “bonusgate”. That is the common Pennsylvania term for the 2004-2006 incidents in which state employees, on state time, did political work for the Democratic Party, including substantial work on challenging the Ralph Nader petition in 2004 and the Green Party petition in 2006. Thanks to Larry Otter for the link. The new revelations concern attempts to destroy evidence, including destroying state computers and disks of e-mails.

On June 3, the Maine House defeated LD 144, the bill that would have reduced the number of state representatives from 151 to 131. UPDATE: because the Senate had passed this bill on June 2, the bill could still conceivably pass. See this story in the June 4 Kennebec Journal, which says that even though the bill has been defeated twice in the House, there will probably be a third vote.