The most obscure California partisan elected office is Board of Equalization. The state is divided into four districts, each of which elects a member to the State Board of Equalization, which deals with taxes.

As of Monday morning, November 12, Mike Schaefer, a Democrat, has 49.8% of the votes against his Republican opponent, State Senator Joel Anderson. California still has millions of uncounted ballots, and there is a strong tendency for the late-counted ballots to be more Democratic than Republican. It is quite likely that when all the ballots are counted, Schaefer will have won the election.

Schaefer has been a champion of write-in voting. In 1986 he was the attorney who won a decision from the California Supreme Court, Canaan v Abdelnour, that both the U.S. Constitution and the California constitution protect the right of voters to cast a write-in vote. He had sued San Diego, which did not permit write-ins in city run-off elections, and he won the case 6-1.

But, that win for voting rights was wiped out by the California Supreme Court in 2002, in another case Schaefer handled, Edelstein v Nishioka. San Francisco, in its last Mayoral election before switching to ranked choice voting, barred write-ins in its December 1999 Mayoral runoff. A write-in candidate sued and won in the State Court of Appeals in 2001, but the next year the California Supreme Court reversed, and wiped out the Canaan precedent. That is why California has been able to ban write-ins for Congress and partisan state office in general elections.

Schaefer also won a landmark qualifications case, when he represented himself in Schaefer v Townsend. In that case, the 9th circuit ruled in June 2000 that Article One of the U.S. Constitution does not permit states to require congressional candidates to be registered voters. Schaefer at the time wanted to run in a special congressional election in California, but he was barred from the ballot because he was not a registered California voter. He couldn’t register in California because he was a resident of Las Vegas at the time. California asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Schaefer’s win, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal.

Schaefer’s likely win in this month’s election has received little press attention so far. He is 80 years old, has run for other elected office dozens of times over the last few decades in Maryland, Nevada, and California, and had not come close to winning. He had been elected to the San Diego city council when he was in his 20’s, but had not won an election since then.

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.

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.