Senator Ron Calderon, chair of the California Senate Elections Committee, has introduced SB 439. It would provide that when write-ins are being counted, the intent of the voter should prevail, even if the voter casting the write-in vote didn’t follow all the instructions. This bill would assist write-in candidates in elections that use optical scan ballots (i.e., ballots which ask voters to fill in an oval or complete an arrow).

The Tennessee bills to establish a category in the election law for qualified minor parties will be heard in Joint State & Local Government Committees on April 3. The bills are SB288 and HB626. They require a group that wishes to be a ballot-qualified party (and to nominate by convention) to submit a petition of 2,500 signatures.

Currently, Tennessee has no “qualified minor party” provision in its election law. Either a party is a qualified major party (which requires 45,254 signatures, if it didn’t poll 5% for president or governor at either of the last two elections), or it can’t appear on the ballot at all. No party other than the Democratic and Republican Parties has been qualified in Tennessee since 1972.