On Wednesday, August 30, the Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee will hear SB 224, which would move the 2024 primary for all office from late April to March 19. If the bill passes, it will have no effect on the petition deadline for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties.

If the bill passes, Democratic and Republican candidates would need to be circulating primary petitions to get on the ballot in the days before Christmas. But if the bill doesn’t pass, the 2024 primary interferes with Passover. It doesn’t seem to occur to Pennsylvania legislators that they are free to abolish primary petitions. A majority of states do not require primary petitions; instead, they depend on filing fees to keep primary ballots from being too crowded.

On August 28, a Connecticut state trial court held oral arguments in Shafiq Abdussabur v Evans. The issue is whether the Plaintiff should be added to the Democratic primary ballot as a candidate for Mayor. The primary is next month. The candidate had enough valid signatures but the New Haven election board did not realize he had enough, so they left him off the ballot. The city argues that it is too late to add him to the ballot, even though the regular ballots have not been printed yet, although some absentee ballots have been printed. See this story.

LNC v Saliba – Page IDs is the 29 page transcript of the Wednesday, August 23, 2023 hearing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the Libertarian National Committee’s motion for a Preliminary Injunction in its Trademark usage case against several Libertarian Party members in Michigan. US District Court Judge Judith Levy granted the LNC’s request for a Preliminary Injunction and ruled from the bench that the activities of the defendant Michigan Libertarians did constitute commerce, and that the Lanham Act does protect the LNC’s Trademarked “Libertarian Party.”