On June 7, the Connecticut legislature adjourned. HB 6908, which would have changed the deadline for a qualified minor party to submit the names of its nominees from 62 days before the general election, to the Friday after the second Tuesday in August, failed to pass. The same bill also moved the date of the presidential primaries from the fourth Tuesday in April to the first Tuesday in April. The bill had passed the House on June 2 but it didn’t get brought up in the Senate.

In Connecticut, qualified minor parties nominate by convention.

On June 8, A7690 passed both houses of the New York legislature. This is the bill that sets up an April 2 date for 2024 presidential primaries.

The Economist magazine’s Economist Intelligence Unit (“EIU”) has issued its Democracy Index 2022 report, which it does annually. For the seventh consecutive year, the United States has been rated as a “Flawed Democracy,” ranked 30th among all nations, down from 26th in the 2021 report.

In this report, nations are rated on a ten point scale, with “Full Democracies” earning a score between 8 and 10, and “Flawed Democracies” scoring between 6 and 8. The US Overall Score was 7.85.

“Hybrid Regimes” were nations that earned an Overall Score between 4 and 6. A score below 4 meant the nation has an Authoritarian Regime.

Each democracy’s Overall Score was an average of scores in five subcategories: Electoral Process & Pluralism, Functioning of Government, Political Participation, Political Culture and Civil Liberties. Within each of the five subcategories, there were between 8 and 17 fairly objective questions, each of which required a “Yes” or “No” or “In Between” answer.

The US’ lowest subcategory scores were 6.43 on Functioning of Government and 6.25 on Political Culture.

The report has an interesting and in-depth analysis of Russia’s inability to develop into a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and how that led to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War.

Here is the report:

Democracy-Index-2022-final