The New Mexico legislature adjourned for the year on March 17. Bills to legalize fusion, to pass the National Popular Vote Plan, and to abolish straight-ticket voting, all failed to make any headway.
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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.
On March 21, the New Hampshire House Election Law Committee passed SB 36. It abolishes the straight-ticket device and gives New Hampshire an office-group ballot format (as opposed to party column format). The bill had already passed the State Senate.
A bill will be introduced in the Idaho State Senate on Monday, March 26, to create a system in which voters register into parties. The bill will not let members of parties vote in any primary other than that voter’s own party. However, the bill will require that parties permit independents to vote in any primary.
On March 15, HB 358 was introduced in the Alabama House to move the presidential primary from June to February. A bill to do this had passed last year, but because it had a technical error in it, the state didn’t forward it to the U.S. Justice Department for pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act. Therefore, the 2006 change is null and void. The error was that the 2006 bill accidentally moved the primary for all office, not just president, from June to February. The new bill, HB 358, will keep the June primary for all office except president.