The Alabama Secretary of State has these official election returns for U.S. Senate from the special election of December 12, 2017. The percentages barely changed from the election night unofficial totals. On election night Doug Jones was credited with 49.92% of the total. Now he has 49.97% of the total. The official totals are: Doug Jones 673,896; Roy Moore 651,972; write-ins 22,852. The write-ins are 1.69%.

Anyone who wants to see who received write-in votes will be forced to wade through 426 pages of the appendix. There are copies of each county’s write-in tally. The Secretary of State doesn’t care to do the work of going through the county returns and totalling the votes for each person whose name was written in. In principle, that is little different than the State forcing everyone to go through the 428 pages to get the statewide vote for Doug Jones and Roy Moore. All write-ins in Alabama are valid votes, yet the state has chosen to make it easy for the public to know the totals for two particular candidates, but no one else.

The only third party candidate, Ron Bishop, Libertarian, appears to have received 1,123 write-ins. Bullock County only listed the names of individuals who received write-in votes, but did not say how many each got. The results from Dale and Morgan Counties are virtually unreadable. Some counties did not include a county total, but merely the total in each precinct. Those counties are Cullman, Jefferson, Lamar, and Pike.

The Federal Elections Commission’s book of 2016 election returns is now available electronically. It is called Federal Elections 2016. The paper copies will be available in a few weeks. Here is the pdf.

The FEC obtained complete write-in results from November 2016 for president in Rhode Island, data that had not previously been available anywhere. See page 39. For instance, Darrell Castle, Constitution Party nominee, is shown with 52 write-in votes, which had not before been included in his national total.

On December 27, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, the case over whether federal anti-trust law has any bearing on the Commission on Presidential Debates’ restrictive policy on who gets into the debates. Here is a copy of the cert petition.