On February 8, the New Mexico House Government, Elections & Indian Affairs Committee passed HB 4. It provides that every adult citizen-resident known to exist would automatically be registered, unless he or she opted out.
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On February 7, the Washington State Senate Committee on State Government and Elections passed SB 5209 by 4-3. It makes voting mandatory. Here is the text. It is sponsored by 14 Democratic State Senators: Sam Hunt, Andy Bilig, Lisa Wellman, Bob Hasegawa, Lisa Lovelett, Rebecca Saldana, Mark Liias, Steve Conway, Manka Dhingra, Karen Keiser, Patty Kuderer, Joe Nguyen, Javiere Valdez, and Claire Wilson.
It is ironic that a bill for mandatory voting is making headway in the state with one of the least choices on general election ballots. Washington uses a top-two system, so that there are never more than two candidate on the general election ballot for congress or any partisan state office. No minor party candidate has ever managed to qualify for the November ballot for one of those offices if both major parties had a member who filed in the primary for that same office.
Furthermore, Washington has the most restrictive definition of a qualified party in any state in the western half of the
United States. It is the only state in the western half of the nation in which only the Democratic and Republican Parties have been qualified during the last twenty years. The definition of a qualified party in Washington is one that polled 5% for president in the last general election.
Chris Vance has a two-part article on the Niskanen Center’s website, about his independent run for the Washington State Senate in 2022. He is a former Republican state legislator and the 2016 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Washington, but he switched to being an independent in 2017.
Even though he persuaded the Democratic Party not to run anyone for State Senate, 31st district, in 2022, so that he was the only opponent of the Republican incumbent, he lost, polling 43.78% of the vote in November in his two-person race.
Here is the link to the second part of his essay. It shows that the Washington top-two system is no panacea for independent candidates. He is now with the Forward Party. Unfortunately he does not discuss proportional representation, which is the only proposed reform that would really create a multi-party system in the U.S. The Forward Party continues to ignore proportional representation, and instead still advocates that parties should no longer be allowed to have nominees on the ballot, even though his election experience of 2022 rebuts that idea.
The second part of the Vance article has a link to Part One. Part One describes the 2022 race.
Colorado SB 23-101, a bill which would have injured ballot access for qualified minor parties, had been scheduled for a hearing on Thursday, February 9. But it has been removed from the committee agenda. This probably means that the sponsors realize the bill would not pass.
The Libertarian Party and the Unity Party have been organizing opposition to the bill. It would end the ability of qualified minor parties to nominate by convention. Instead, their members could only be nominated by submitting difficult petitions to appear on a primary ballot, although no primary would actually be held if only one person submitted a petition for any particular office.
On February 1, five Georgia Representatives introduced HB 200, to let cities use ranked choice voting for their own elections of city officers. There are two Republican sponsors, Joseph Gullett and Clay Pirkle; and three Democrats, Stacey Evans, Mary Margaret Oliver, and Debbie Buckner.