As of noon, Friday, September 30, the California Republican Party still hasn’t submitted its list of presidential elector candidates to the Secretary of State. The American Independent Party has already submitted its list of elector candidates. The lists are due October 1, but because that is Saturday, the actual deadline is Monday, October 3.
Until the Republican list is submitted, the public won’t know whether the names of the presidential elector candidates for each party’s slate match. Both parties nominated Donald Trump for President. But just because two parties nominate the same presidential candidate, it does not follow that each party necessarily files the same slate of presidential electors as the other party. This year in New York, both the Independence Party and the Libertarian Party nominated Gary Johnson. But each party submitted separate lists of elector candidates.
If the two California slates do not match, it will be impossible for California to know how many votes each candidate for presidential elector received. U.S. Code Title 3, section 6, requires each state to tell the National Archives how many valid votes each candidate for presidential elector receives. California does not let voters choose which slate of electors to vote for. Trump is on the ballot with only one box for the voter to choose. He is on as “Donald J. Trump, Republican, American Independent.” By contrast, in New York, the ballot has two Johnson squares: one square for voters to choose the Independence Party electors, and another square for the voters to choose the Libertarian electors.
Perhaps one gang of Trump electors can take off their heads and put them on the bodies of the other gang of Trump electors ???
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Abolish the FATAL super time bomb Electoral College — merely to avoid Civil WAR II and/or World WAR III.
Uniform definition of Elector-Voter in ALL of the USA.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
What’s the point?
For the New York situation, do the votes for Johnson on the two different ballot lines all count toward the 5% national vote that the FEC uses for national party status?
David, yes, they both count. By analogy, when John B. Anderson got 6.6% of the vote in 1980, and thereby became entitled to general election public funding, the FEC didn’t care that in some states he was an independent, in some states he was the nominee of the Anderson Coalition Party, and in New York he was the Liberal Party nominee. The FEC added up all his votes on all labels.
Also in 1996 when Ross Perot got 8.5% and became entitled to general election public funding, it didn’t matter that in some states he was the Reform Party nominee, and in some states he was an independent, and in New York he was the Independence Party nominee. All his votes were added together. The law pertains to the candidate’s vote total, not the party’s vote total. It happens that both Anderson and Perot were on the ballot in all states, but if they hadn’t been, write-ins in states in which the candidate wasn’t on the ballot would have counted. One can see the official FEC national presidential vote totals in the FEC’s free excellent books of election returns. The title is always “Federal Elecctions (year).” A book comes out every 2 years. That is one of the purposes of the books, to measure precisely which candidates get 5%.
The FE book comes out in about July-August AFTER the election — never noticed by the regular media.
Trump will probably lose California anyways . Moderate Republicans will probably vote for Clinton or Johnson.Lets see what happens .It will be interesting to see the Election results from Orange County