On June 9, the Maine Senate passed LD 1041 on second reading. UPDATE: on June 10, the House passed the bill on third reading. The bill still must pass the Senate on third reading. This is the bill that alters the method by which a party remains on the ballot. Existing law requires it to have polled 5% for either Governor or President. The bill changes this to keep a party on the ballot if it has 10,000 registered members who voted at the last general election. The only party now on the ballot besides the Democratic and Republican Parties is the Green Party, which has about 31,000 registrants.

Filing for 2009 Washington city and county elections closed on June 5. The primary is in August. One incumbent city coucilmember, Janet Way, will probably not appear on the August ballot because she tried to file for re-election online, and had computer problems. See this story. Thanks to Chris Roberts for the link.

The newspaper story says that although on-line filing closed at 4 p.m., the King County Elections Department would have let her file in-person as late as 4:30 p.m. However, that would have meant a trip in rush-hour traffic from her home in Shoreline, to downtown Seattle. Shoreline is 15 miles north of Seattle.

Arizona SB 1091 has been assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and will probably have a hearing on June 15. This is the Secretary of State’s omnibus election law bill. The Secretary of State’s amendments propose to ease the out-of-state circulator ban only for independent presidential petitions (the state must make some change, because last year the out-of-state circulator ban was ruled unconstitutional in the 9th circuit).

Under the Secretary of State’s proposal, out-of-state circulators would still be banned if they want to work on independent candidate petitions for office other than president, or if they want to work on petitions to qualify a political party, or to qualify an initiative. It is hoped that people who want the bill expanded will testify that the bill should be amended to legalize out-of-state circulators for all types of petition.