On November 6, the New York state League of Women Voters sued the New York State Board of Elections, arguing that the 25-day cutoff for voters to register is too stringent. The lawsuit proposes that the deadline should be no earlier than ten days before an election. The case is in New York state court in Manhattan, and is being brought by the ACLU.
The November 11 edition of the New York Times here endorses using the single transferable vote variant of ranked choice voting, for U.S. House elections. There has been a bill pending in the U.S. House to use that system, but it has not moved. It is HR 3057. It will be re-introduced into the new U.S. House.
Assuming Kyrsten Sinema is the winner of the U.S. Senate race in Arizona, the Republican Party will have won only two U.S. Senate elections in 2018 in the western states. “Western states” means these thirteen states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
At the beginning of the United States Constitution, the Senate seats were divided into three classes. The seats to be elected in 1790 were called the Class One seats. Class One seats were the seats up in 2018. There are nine western seats in Class One.
The two seats that went Republican in the west this year are Utah and Wyoming. There are four western states that don’t have a Class One seat: Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon.
Here is the number of seats in the west that the Republicans won in past Class One election years, since the beginning of popular election of Senators: 1916 two; 1922 one; 1928 two; 1934 two; 1940 one; 1946 five; 1952 five; 1958 one; 1964 three; 1970 two; 1976 four; 1982 four; 1988 five; 1994 five; 2000 five; 2006 four; 2012 four.
In the United States as a whole, assuming Republicans won the Florida seat and Democrats won the Arizona seat, in 2018 Republicans elected ten Senators out of the 33 regular elections. Republicans won four seats in the midwest and four in the south. Class One seats are notable for having fewer southern seats than the other two classes.
Florida general election ballots in midterm years put congressional races at the beginning of the ballot. This year, Broward County designed a ballot in which the left-most column had instructions for voting at the top of that column. Those instructions are quite wordy and take up a great deal of space. They are printed first in English, then in Spanish, and underneath that, in Creole. At the very bottom of that left-most column, the ballot then lists U.S. Senate, followed by U.S. House.
At the top of the middle column is the Governor’s race, followed by the other statewide state offices.
Almost 4% of the people who cast a ballot did not see the U.S. Senate and U.S. House races, due to their position underneath the voting instructions. This article has a copy of the ballot. One must scroll down to even find the two congressional offices.
The turnout in Alabama this week was so much higher than it was in 2014, that the new statewide petition for new parties and non-presidential independent candidates is now at least 51,416 valid signatures. When the official returns are known, that number will probably be even higher.
By contrast, in 2016 and 2018, the statewide petition was 35,413. That number has increased by 45%.
The same will probably be true in other states in which the 2020 statewide petition is based on the number of votes cast in 2018, whereas the 2018 petition was based on the 2014 turnout: Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas.
