1. Richard,

   I have been working on doing a tally of the change in party registration in Ohio comparing before the primary to after the primary…which is going to be interesting as there are 6 parties in Ohio now. I’ll send it to you when they put up the county file update after the primary.

   What is the breakdown of the other unqualified parties?

   -Vaughn

2. The only other unqualified parties that have asked California to tally how many registrations they have are the Federalist Party, with 12, and the We Like Women Party, which has 130 (almost all of them are in Orange County).

   Any party that had asked for a tally, but didn’t succeed in qualifying earlier this year, must renew its request for a tally. The Whig Party didn’t renew its request, although it is free to do so at any time.

3. #1 California aggregates the numbers for unqualified parties. But if a party is attempting to qualify, they specifically count the number for those parties to determine whether the party has qualified. There is no level of support required to have the numbers checked. In the latest report the following are attempting to qualify:

   Reform Party 22,329
   We Like Women Party 130
   Federalist Party 12

   This leaves 94,338 miscellaneous others.

   When the Reform Party was last qualified, in 2002, they had about 58,000 registrants. They have been attempting to re-qualify more or less continuously ever since (someone has to periodically send in some paper work that says we’re the Reform Party and we’re trying to become a qualified party, count how many members we have). Meanwhile the numbers have been declining.

   California essentially permits write-ins for party registration. On the registration form, you can select that you don’t want to register with a party, which in California is styled as “Declined To State” or DTS, or you can check a box next to one of the 6 qualified parties, or fill in a blank with the name of another party. Only the voter can change their party affiliation. So voters who were registered with the Reform Party will continue to be registered as such, unless they make an effort to change their party, or they die, move, or otherwise become inactive.

   The last party to become non-qualified was the Natural Law Party, in 2007. They had about 22,000 registrants before then, so it is probably down to 15,000 or so.

4. What is the source of the large share of “Other” voters in Fresno (3.22%) and Santa Cruz (4.59%)? This is something that has shown up in the last few years.

   In Santa Cruz there has been a big drop in the DTS share (almost 3% since 2007), so I’m guessing that these are “Independent” voters. In Fresno, there has been a small decline in DTS share, but an increase in numbers.

   At least in the online registration form, the option to not affiliate with a party is separate from the selection of the party. Are Fresno and Santa Cruz using a different standard?

   San Luis Obispo and Sierra are the only counties where “Other” is above twice the statewide average (Santa Cruz is 6.5 times and Fresno 4.5 times, so they are real outliers). SLO is just a bit above 2X and Sierra doesn’t have many total voters, and only 35 “Other” voters.

5. Richard:

   Considering that before 1998, no qualified party had been dis-qualified since the Prohibition Party over 35 years earlie. Which parties have these people been registering in? Do they even exist? How many of these extremely minor parties are there? Do the various Counties ever even list them separately on their County reports? Subtracting the members of the Reform and Natural Law Parties must still leave somewheres over 75,000 of these phantom voters. Seems to me that some sort of voters research report is sitting here.

6. Fairly recently, I discovered that the option on the Golden State’s voter registration form that used to be “I Decline to State a Political Party” has been replaced by: “No, I don’t want to register with a political party. (If you check this box, you may not be able to vote for some parties’ candidates in primary elections.)”. While a person can still register “I Decline to State a Political Party” by simply utilizing one of the older registration forms (which is perfectly valid), the state and that person’s county is going to recognize the person as belonging to the newer category – which is effectually the same as the older one.

7. #5 It appears that most larger counties you can get the voter rolls on a CD – I don’t know whether it has the actual registration by parties of the voters or not. It would be a lot of extra work to keep that separate. I think you would need several $1000 to get these for the entire state. It is federal law to have a statewide voter registration database, but I think this is still a work in progress.

   In Santa Cruz County, the number of miscellaneous voters increased from 1146 to 5029 between 5/12/2008 and 5/19/2008, an increase of 3883, and in the same week the number of DTS voters decreased by 3768.

   Since then miscellaneous has increased by 1358, while total registration has increased by 6825 (so miscellaneous formed 19.9% of the increase, and DTS 16.1%)

   The county elections website

   http://www.votescount.com/parties.htm

   includes the following instructions:

   1. Selected a qualified political party, or

   2. Check “I Decline to State a Political Party” or

   3. Check “Other” and either fill in the name of an unqualified political party, or fill in the word “Nonpartisan.” Some voters consider themselves “Independent” and write that in under other. Please note, checking the box “American Independent” will register voters with that political party (see platform below). To register as an “Independent,” voters must write the word in the blank space provided next to “Other.”

   4. If no box is checked in this section, you will automatically be entered as “Nonpartisan.”

   So it appears that in Santa Cruz county there are around 5000 “Independents”, who are no longer considered to be DTS voters.

8. #7 A somewhat similar change appears to have occurred in Fresno County, where the number of Other increased by 6760, while the number of DTS appeared to decline by 5916 between the April and May 2008 reports. That nearly tripled the number of Other voters. Since then the number of DTS has increased by 5030 while the number of Other has increased by 2190. This could mean around 6.9% of new registrations since then are “Independent” while 15.4% are DTS or “Nonpartisan”.

   It does not appear that Fresno has issued instructions that would encourage voters to register as Independent vs. Nonpartisan, and they appear to be around 3.6% of Santa Cruz County voters vs. 2.3% in Fresno County.

   If we extrapolate to the rest of the state, it would appear that around 15% of DTS voters are actually “Independent” voters, which would provide a party base of about 500,000.

9. Richard,

   By utilizing a four year comparison rather than a three month look, one gets a different perspective on this situation (and one more along the lines of what I had predicted would be the case). In a little blurb in yesterday’s “Sacramento Bee,” titled “Ballot Watch”; Dan Walters wrote that “Democratic voter registration in California is up nearly two percentage points from four years ago, and Republican registration is down nearly four points while independents have crossed the 20 percent threshold” (figures from the secretary of state’s office). Mr. Walters went on to say that “In 2006, Democrats had 42.7 percent of the state’s registered voters and Republicans 34.6 percent. Now the numbers are 44.6 percent and 30.8. Independents, 18.3 percent four years ago, are now 20.1 percent.”

10. I think it is silly for anyone to write a “news” story that disguises what registration changes have occurred this year, and instead focus on what changes occurred in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

    As to how those “other” voters are registered, there are lots of people who fill out voter registration forms with words like “Conservative” or “Socialist” or “American” or “Constitution” or “Progressive” or “Veteran” or “Christian”. Then there are jokesters who fill it out as “Birthday” or “Beer” or “Pajama”. And, as Jim Riley perceived, there seem to be a couple of counties that put “independent” into the miscellaneous column instead of into the “declines to state” column.

    The few states that have published a list of all the designation that voters write in on voter registration forms goes on for pages and pages. Some of them are pretty funny.

11. #10 The current registration form (at least the online version) first asks whether they want to affiliate with a party. If they say that they do, they can then select one of the 6 currently qualified parties, or “Other”. If they select “Other” and then write in “Independent” what other way is there to interpret it than they intend to affiliate with the Independent Party at the next primary.

    If someone would seek to qualify the Independent Party, wouldn’t the SOS direct the counties to make sure that some Independents haven’t been misclassified as Declined To State? They could have a presidential primary in 2012, and let all candidates run, and place the winner on the general election ballot.

12. Dear Richard,

    It is doubtful that Dan Walters was trying to disguise the registration changes this year, as you suggested. It is just that the minor fluctuations of the past three months are nowhere near as important as the major changes that took place over the past four years.

    Phil

13. #10 There are definite “seasonal” changes that occur in registration based on whether there are active voter registration drives prior to the general elections, or mostly purges due to inactive voters. If you only look at a few months you will see those effects and not the longer term trends.

14. Thank you, Jim. As the very old saying goes, be careful that you don’t miss the forest for the trees.

    Dear “Deemer from California”:

    In partial response to your questions in #5 above, it just so happens that I have an old copy of the “Sacramento County Party Code Table” from September of 1997. At the bottom, it lists Declines to State with a Party Abbreviation of DTS and a Party Code of N. Underneath that are listed Independent; and Nonpartisan: both with no Party Abbreviation but both with the Party Code of N (the same as DTS). Furthermore, it goes on to say: “If blank – key N.”

    For the actual parties, there are thirty-three and they are listed as follows: American Independent; American Christian Party; Central; Christian Heritage Party; Citizens; Conservative Party; Constitution Party; Democrat; Environmentalist; Equal Justice; Green Party; Humanist Party; Human Principles Party; La Raza Party; Libertarian; Middle Class Party; Miscellaneous; National Party; National Unity Party; Natural Law Party; Patriot Party; Peace & Freedom; Pragmatic Party; Prohibition; Puritan Party; Real American Party; Reform Party; Republican Party; Rock & Roll Party; SLP [actual name will be added in an addendum message in order to avoid the Yahoo! censorship on this first message]; SWP [same as above]; Unlimitism Party; Whig Party.

    While this information is dated and it is only for one county (although a very large county), it should cast some light upon the questions that you were asking.

    Phil

15. Addendum message to #14:

    SLP = Socialist-Labor [the Socialist Labor Party]; and SWP = Socialist Workers [the Socialist Workers Party].

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