1. I find it interesting that American Delta has as many registrants as the Green Party, considering the average person on the street has no idea what the American Delta Party is.

2. 822 in New Castle, 7 in Kent and 6 in Sussex?

   It’s a little odd that 822 of American Delta’s 835 registrants are in New Castle County.

   It’s the largest county in Delaware, but it’s not 99% of the state.

3. A party in Delaware qualifies by having 0.1% of total registrants (as of December 31 of previous year). You will notice that the American Delta and Green parties are just above this threshold.

   So if a new party wishes to qualify, instead of getting voters to sign a petition for either the party, or nominees of the party, you have to get them to affiliate with the party, either by changing the party on their registration, or affiliating with the party on a new registration.

   Regardless of the method, you would target an area where you can encounter voters on the street or perhaps shopping centers. So you head to Wilmington the only city in the state, or perhaps the University of Delaware, which is at Newark, also in New Castle County.

   Delaware requires that if you (re)register voters as part of a qualification drive that you may be changing their party affiliation. Some campaigns in the past might have been a bit edgy in this regard, particularly if a paper application was used.

   The Green Party had lost about 10% of its registration this Spring to voters switching to the Democratic Party in order to vote for Bernie Sanders, so it looks like it may have had to push a bit to remain qualified.

4. Delaware has online voter registration, and all the parties in the report are in a pull-down menu on the on-line registration form. American Delta is now on that list. I found a registration report from 2013 that showed some additional parties with 0 registrants (all the codes from A to Z were taken).

   It appears that the list was cleaned up. American Delta may have received “B” because it was the first available letter, or perhaps because it was the closest to “A”.

   The on-line registration requires a party selection. If you don’t want to affiliate with a party, you nonetheless have to open the pull down list, and scan to near the bottom of the list for “Unaffiliated”. It is not at the end of the list because it is not a party, but rather because it begins with ‘U’. It is between ‘The Blue Enigma Party’ and ‘Working Family Party’.

   It appears that the online application is inducing affiliation with minor parties, particularly those near the top of the list. Voters who go online to register, or check that they are registered, or update an address or a name, will also be given an opportunity (perhaps a requirement) to state a party affiliation.

   Since the September report, ‘American’, which is first on the list has surged by 66% (243 to 404). ‘American’, ‘Conservative’, and ‘Liberal’ do not include ‘Party’. Perhaps these are residual registrations from long ago. Was the American Party, George Wallace’s vehicle in the state? I know nothing about them.

   ‘American Delta Party’ declined a handful between October and November, so a voter who might have been registered by the party qualification drive, may have gone online to check that they were registered, and then simply selected a different party or purposely changed it.

   ‘Conservative’ has increased by 24% in two months.
   ‘Constitution Party’ has declined by 3% (they may be harmed by being an actual party)
   ‘Green Party’ has increased by 24%
   ‘Independent Party of Del’ has increased by 19% (the numeric increase of the Independent Party is almost as great as that for the Republican Party’)
   ‘Liberal’ has increased by 18%
   ‘Libertarian Party’ has increased by 20%
   ‘Natural Law Party’ is unchanged. It has been slowly dropping since 2013, likely due to registrants dying or moving from the state, or perhaps updating a registration.

   ‘Other/All Other Parties’ has increased by 3%. On the online form, there is a text entry box for Other party, but it is unclear how it is connected to the pull-down list, which is indicated as a required field. How does someone recognize that their party is not on the list, that it is in fact a party “Other” than the 16 listed? Let’s say you wanted to register with ‘Americans Elect’. So would you actually go to the trouble of pulling down the list, and selecting ‘Other’, then typing ‘Americans Elect’? Or what if you select “Other” and don’t type anything. Are you registered as affiliated with the “Other Party” or do you get registered as Unaffiliated.

   ‘Reform Party’ down 4%. Like Natural Law Party it has been slowly declining.
   ‘Socialist Workers Party’ down 1%.
   ‘The Blue Enigma Party’ down 8%

   ‘Unaffiliated’ down 0.2%. This is quite remarkable. Ordinarily there is a surge in registrations in the months before a general election, as registration drives hook voters. Those who are unaware that there was going to be a presidential election, or answer “Don’t Know” to the question “What is November?”, or think that Tuesday follows Ruby, end up unaffiliated. After a registration purge, there is a big drop in unaffiliated, as those who were hooked in previous elections have disappeared.

   ‘Working Families Party’ down 2% (they are last on the list).

   It would be interesting to see what the pull-down menu looks like on a mobile device. Do you have to scroll down to see the last entries?

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