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.

The Russian government is barring Aleksei Navalny from the March 2018 presidential ballot because he was once convicted of a crime. In the United States, it would not be possible for the government to keep anyone of the ballot for federal office because he or she was once convicted of a crime. The U.S. Constitution sets forth the qualifications to run for federal elective office, and neither the states, nor the federal government, can add to those qualifications.

This is why California Governor Jerry Brown was correct this year to veto SB 149, which barred presidential candidates from the ballot if they did not release their tax returns. And this is why it was wrong for Pennsylvania, Alabama and Arkansas to keep Rocky De La Fuente off the ballot in 2016 on the grounds that he had sought the Democratic presidential nomination earlier that year, and why it was wrong for Michigan to do the same thing to Gary Johnson in 2012.

Past presidential candidates in the United States, who were not barred from the ballot in any state because they were felons or ex-felons, include Eugene Debs, Vincent Hallinan, and Lyndon LaRouche.