The California Secretary of State regularly issues a document called “Report of Registration”, which shows how many registered voters there are in each party. The document always includes the name and contact information for the chair of each qualified party, and also the chair of parties that are trying to qualify.

The latest Report of Registration, for March 2022, was initially released to show that Markham Robinson is state chair of the American Independent Party, but he died in 2021. The Secretary of State has now revised the Report to show no state chair for the American Independent Party. It only shows the address of the party’s website, which has not been altered for two years. See the Secretary of State’s list of party officers here.

It is the duty of the Secretary of State to determine the party officers of each qualified party, and no Secretary of State of California has previously refused to do that. In 2008 then-Secretary Debra Bowen determined who the party officers were, at a time when there was a dispute over the identity of the party state officers.

Both sides in the Georgia ballot access lawsuit, Cowen v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-4660, have agreed to postpone the remaining part of the case. This is the case over the 5% petition for independent candidates for U.S. House, and the nominees of unqualified parties. The U.S. District Court had struck down the law on First Amendment grounds, but then the Eleventh Circuit had reinstated it.

So far, the equal protection part of the lawsuit still has not been adjudicated, and remains pending in U.S. District Court. Both sides have agreed to postpone that part of the case until the plaintiffs can ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the First Amendment part of the case.

France is holding a run-off presidential election on Sunday, April 24. Each polling place has approximately 1,000 registered voters. During the day, poll workers at each polling place take note when 100 ballots have been cast. At that point the ballots are retrieved and sent to the counting station. This is repeated, each time another 100 ballots have been cast. Therefore, because the bulk of the counting is done during the day, the votes will have been counted within an hour and thirty minutes of the closing of the polls.

In the U.S., in which almost all public elections are on Tuesday, there is a glut of voters in the evening, because many people work on Tuesday during the normal business hours and then vote when they leave work in the evening. But in France, and many other countries, the flow of voters to the polling station is more evenly-spaced, because most people don’t work on Sundays.

France has no postal ballots, but France allows proxy voting. French citizens living in possessions of France have the same voting rights and the same procedures for in-person voting. French citizens living overseas, in parts of the world that are not French possessions, vote at French government offices such as consulates. See this article for more about proxy voting.