On June 7, the Wisconsin voters who sued their state over its partisan gerrymander, and who won their case in a three-judge U.S. District Court, filed this brief in the U.S. Supreme Court. The voters hope that the U.S. Supreme Court (which won’t decide whether to hear the state’s appeal until October 2017 at the earliest) will not stay the lower court decision. If no stay is granted by the U.S. Supreme Court, then the Wisconsin legislature will be forced to redistrict the legislative districts this year, or else the U.S. District Court will do it this year.

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to grant a stay at its June 8 conference, but the news from that conference won’t be announced until June 12. Thanks to Barry Burden for the link.

On June 7, the Colorado Secretary of State determined that the Unity Party has the needed 1,000 registrations to become a qualified party. See this press release from the Secretary of State’s office.

Colorado won’t keep track of the number of registered voters in unqualified parties, unless that unqualified party had previously placed a statewide nominee on the ballot. The Unity Party nominee for U.S. Senate petitioned onto the 2014 ballot, and also the 2016 ballot, so it had the right to a tally.

The only other parties that have become ballot-qualified in Colorado by this method have been the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution Parties. Several other qualified minor parties in the past got on by the alternate method of collecting 10,000 signatures. The most recent instance was in 2011 when Americans Elect qualified. Thanks to Independent Political Report for this news.

On June 6, California held a special U.S. House election run-off in the 34th district. Here is a link to the California Secretary of State’s web page, showing the votes. The race was between two Democrats. Although not all votes have been counted yet, so far only 32,869 votes are tallied for both of the two candidates (Jimmy Gomez 19,761; Robert Lee Ahn 13,108).

In November 2016, 159,156 votes were cast for this office. The November 2016 race was also between two Democrats, with voters not allowed to vote for anyone else.

The Montana special U.S. House election of May 25, 2017, had a turnout of 383,267 votes. However, to be fair, the Montana U.S. House district has a greater population than any other U.S. House district. In the Montana election, voters had a choice of three parties on the ballot, and write-in space was on the ballot.

In the Kansas special U.S. House election of April 11, 2017, the total vote cast for each of the three candidates on the ballot was 122,594. The Kansas ballot also had write-in space, but no declared write-in filed, so no one can know how many write-ins were cast.