MASSACHUSETTS Secretary of State William F. Galvin (D) warned last week that if the cuts to his office in Gov. Charlie Baker’s (R) proposed budget are approved the state will not be able to hold its 2016 presidential primary on March 1 as planned. “This country is scheduled to elect a new...

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Fernande Duffly revealed last week she would soon step down, becoming the third justice in the last week to announce their retirement. Duffly, 66, said she would leave the bench in July, four years before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, to devote...

NH House Panel Considers Voting Laws The NEW HAMPSHIRE House Election Committee this week reviewed a measure that would ask voters to require residents to actually live in the state for 10 days before being eligible to vote. State law currently requires voters to be “domiciled” in the...

Lobbyist Spending Down in MA Lobbyist spending last year in MISSOURI - which totaled about $690,000 - was down by more than $200,000 from any other year on record, and spending has continued to fall this year, according to analysis of Missouri Ethics Commission data by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...

With questions about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election still in the headlines , a number of states are considering legislation to block businesses with foreign ties from contributing to political campaigns. Noncitizens and foreign companies are already barred from contributing...

SUPREME COURT STAYS TX REMAP ORDER: The U.S. Supreme Court stayed the Aug. 24 ruling by a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Western District of TEXAS that several of that state’s legislative districts had been drawn in a way that intentionally discriminated against...

Although there appears to be broad public support for some gun control measures , federal action on any of them seems unlikely in the current political climate. “The possibility of evidence-based firearm laws has become so politically toxic that there’s essentially zero action on firearm...

MA HIGH COURT UPHOLDS PRE-ELECTION DAY VOTER REGISTRATION BLACKOUT MASSACHUSETTS’ Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court, has upheld a state law barring voters who haven’t registered at least 20 days before Election Day from casting ballots. The court ruled that the law...

CA REQUIRES REPORTING OF VOTER DATA BREACHES CALIFORNIA Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed legislation last week requiring people and organizations that obtain voter registration data to report security breaches of that information. Assemblyman Marc Berman (D), who authored the bill ( AB 1678 ), said it...

STATES TEMPORARILY BLOCK 3D PRINTABLE GUNS U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik temporarily blocked the TEXAS -based company Defense Distributed from publishing blueprints on the Internet for making plastic guns on 3D printers. That decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by eight states challenging...

On November 6, voters in 37 states will consider 158 ballot measures, just one more than the 157 propositions in 2016, according to the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. Among the issues on the ballot this year in multiple states, marijuana legalization...

Marijuana legalization was one of the most prevalent issues on state ballots on Nov. 6. And with the approval of one of those measures, Proposal 1 , on a 54-46 vote, Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize marijuana for recreational use. But voters in another Midwestern state, North...

Dismissal rates in certain types of criminal cases in Massachusetts - including some that involve public officials - vary widely from court to court, according to analysis of court data by the Boston Globe . In Massachusetts, when someone is accused of a misdemeanor crime but not arrested, they’re...

A group called Voter Choice Massachusetts has proposed a ballot measure for the state’s 2020 election that would replace the state’s current winner-take-all election system with a ranked-choice system. Under a ranked-choice system, voters are asked to rank the candidates for each applicable...