On September 6, California elections officials announced that an initiative to revise legislative term limits had qualified for the February 2008 ballot. The margin was extraordinarily close. The initiative requires 763,790 signatures, and the random sample showed that it has 764,747 valid signatures. The initiative, if it passes, will allow many incumbent state legislators to file for re-election in the June non-presidential primary.

UPDATE: the actual legal requirement is 694,354 valid signatures. The post above is misleading. The number 763,790 is actually the number needed to avoid checking all the signatures, instead of depending on the random sample. If the random sample shows a petition has 110% of the legal requirement, then elections officials can deem it to be OK, and don’t need to check all the signatures. If California elections officials had needed to check all the signatures, the initiative would not have been on the February 2008 ballot. Instead, it would have been on the June 2008 ballot, too late to help the incumbent legislators who are term-limited out and desire to run for new terms, which they can do if the initiative passes in February.

On August 30, the California legislature gave final approval to SB 439, and sent it to the Governor. It legalizes write-ins in which the voter forgets to “X” the box next to the name written in. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill in 2006.

On September 4, Michigan’s Governor signed SB 624, which moves the Michigan presidential primary to January 15. The Republican Party of Michigan says it will use this primary, even though national party rules will penalize the state party by refusing to seat half its delegates to the national convention.

It is still not clear what the Michigan Democratic Party will do. The party will lose all its delegates if it chooses them in the primary. The party is free to ignore the primary and use caucuses in February, if it wishes to avoid any loss of delegates. It is true that on August 31, the Michigan Democratic Party resolved to use its primary, but the party might change its mind.