ANNAPOLIS — Want to run for president of the United States in Maryland? These lawmakers would like to see your income tax return first.

A Democratic majority in the Maryland Senate moved forward a bill on Thursday that would require presidential candidates to release their federal income tax returns to the Maryland State Board of Elections before a general election. The elections board would, in turn, make the returns publicly available online.

Supporters say that the bill, which would apply to all presidential candidates beginning in 2020, was not intended to target President Donald Trump, but his decision during the 2016 campaign to flout the decades-long practice of voluntary disclosure brought the issue to the fore.

In a Quinnipiac University Poll released last week, 67 percent of Americans said they think Trump should publicly release his tax returns

Saying Texas’ current practice is discriminatory, a group of Hispanic activists and lawyers has sued the state in hopes of blocking it from awarding all of its Electoral College votes to one candidate during presidential elections. The lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday calls on Texas to treat voters “in an equal manner” by abolishing that “winner-take-all” approach, which all but two states use. The suit, filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens and a coalition of Texas lawyers, says that approach violates the U.S. Constitution and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It’s just one of many pending voting rights lawsuits arguing that Texas, which regularly votes Republican, has illegally discriminated against voters of color.

Similar Electoral College lawsuits were also filed Wednesday in Republican-dominated South Carolina and Democratic-leaning Massachusetts and California. The South Carolina suit also alleges a Voting Rights Act violation.

At the suit’s core is the doctrine of “one person, one vote,” rooted in the 14th Amendment. The plaintiffs argue that the winner-take-all system is unconstitutional because Texans who favor losing candidates “effectively had their votes cancelled,” while voters who favor winning candidates see their influence “unconstitutionally [magnified].” The suit also alleges that winner-take-all violates the First Amendment.

Notably, McCarthy and York placed the same sizable caveat in their pieces: In McCarthy’s words, “It could be that this is just Judge Sullivan’s standard order on exculpatory information, filed in every case over which he presides.” But oddly, while such caveats implicitly acknowledge that the story would be much less interesting if Sullivan is among the federal judges who issue standing Brady orders for every one of the criminal cases on their dockets, neither writer seems to have actually bothered to check if that is actually his practice.

I checked, and it is. As he explained in a 2016 law review article calling for the amendment of the rules of federal criminal procedure to incorporate such disclosures, “I now issue a standing Brady Order in each criminal case on my docket, which I update as the law in the area progresses.” Thus, Sullivan’s action was not “unusual” or “curious,” but simply what he does in every single criminal case he oversees.

Napolitano and his ilk seem to have picked up the story York and McCarthy put forth, but stripped off their caveat and instead asserted as fact that Sullivan’s action must be because he suspects some sort of malfeasance from Mueller, or even because, as Napolitano suggested, Flynn was not guilty to begin with.

Van der Zwaan’s father-in-law German Khan is a co-founder of Alfa Bank, which fell under FBI investigation for attempting repeatedly to link up to a computer server in Trump Tower during the presidential campaign.

FBI investigators concluded the Trump Organization server appeared to be controlled by the marketing firm Cendyn, which was blasting out emails promoting Trump-branded hotel properties.

Khan and Alfa Bank showed up repeatedly in the dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele, who misspelled the bank as “Alpha Bank.”

The billionaire Khan, who showed up in a recent list of Russian oligarchs with ties to Vladimir Putin, has sued Steele for libel.