On November 7, a Wyoming state trial court upheld Wyoming’s “sore loser” law, and also the fairly new law that doesn’t let voters choose a primary ballot unless they have been members of that party for several months before the primary. Malcom v Gray, Laramie County, 2024-cv-202658. See this story. The plaintiffs will probably appeal to the State Supreme Court.
In November 2024, John Eder was elected as a Republican to the Maine House of Representatives. Eder had also been elected to the House in 2002 as a Green, and he had been re-elected as a Green in 2004. See the wikipedia page about him.
He represented part of Portland when he was a Green. His new district is centered on Waterboro, which is south of Portland.
On November 4, voters in Cato, New York, faced a ballot with only one candidate for all five positions. The election is partisan, and the candidates listed were Republican nominees. But many people in town made a late decision to file as write-ins, and the write-in candidates won for Town Supervisor, Town Clerk, Town Council (2 seats), and Highway Superintendent. See this story.
Cato is in Cayuga County.
Three Working Families Party nominees were elected on November 5, 2025, in Connecticut, even though the WFP nominees were not also Democratic Party nominees.
In Bridgeport, five seats were up for the Board of Education. The election is partisan. Bridgeport uses Limited Voting, and when five seats are up, no party is permitted to have more than three nominees. Democrats ran three nominees; the Working Families Party ran two nominees; the Republican Party ran two nominees.
The two Working Families nominees, Joseph Sokolovic and Rob Trader, only beat the Republicans because the Independent Party cross-endorsed the WFP nominees. Here is a copy of the ballot.
In Hartford, four seats were up and only four candidates ran, so it was easy for the WFP nominee, Shonta Browdy, to win. Hartford also uses Limited Voting for Board of Education, which is why only three Democrats ran.
On November 4, Elon Musk posted a message that criticized the New York City Mayoral Ballot being used that day. He hadn’t previously seemed to know about fusion, which New York permits. He felt it was unfair that Zohran Mamdani was on the ballot twice, once as the Democratic nominee and once as the Working Families nominee.
But he also criticized the ballot because independent candidate Andrew Cuomo was listed in the bottom line, apart from the nominees of the four qualified parties. Musk was quite right to note that the ballot format is unfair.
Unfortunately, reaction to Musk concentrated on his apparent ignorance about fusion voting, and ignored Musk’s valid point about the ballot format. New York is one of only five states that uses party-column or party-row ballots. Every other state uses office-group ballots, in which all the candidates for a particular office are grouped together. Each office has a separate part of the ballot. So an office-group lets voters focus on all the candidates for one particular race, without being distracted by candidates for another office.
Furthermore, among the 45 states with office-group ballots, one-third of them give an equal opportunity for any candidate to be listed first.
See this story, one of many that talks about the Musk message, and yet virtually ignores what he said about ballot format.
