The Philadelphia Inquirer has this editorial, advocating that the nation eliminate the electoral college.
It’s the latest in a long series of electoral college reform proposals.
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Legislators in Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas have agreed to introduce ballot access improvement bills in 2017. It is hoped that legislators in additional states will soon be found. This is the time when activists have the most opportunity to get bills introduced.
According to this Washington Post story, there are or soon will be bills in California, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York to keep presidential candidates off the ballot if those candidates don’t release their federal income tax returns. These laws are overwhelmingly likely to be held unconstitutional if they are passed. The idea should be presented as a national constitutional amendment. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
Among presidential candidates who had candidates for presidential elector in states containing a majority of the electoral college, Evan McMullin easily received a greater share of his votes via write-ins than any other presidential candidate.
McMullin was on the ballot in eleven states: Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. These states represented only 16% of the electorate. From those eleven states, he received 510,002 votes. In the states that counted his write-ins, he received 221,267. This means 30.3% of all his votes were write-ins. Never before had a presidential candidate of significance received such a high proportion of his votes as write-ins.
Prior to McMullin, the presidential candidates who received the largest share of their votes as write-ins were Eugene McCarthy in 1976, and Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2004. But neither of them received write-ins amounting to more than one-eighth of their totals.
The final McMullin vote will be increased when Rhode Island finishes tallying its presidential write-ins, which may be as early as January 4, 2017.
On January 3, the Ohio Libertarians whose names were on the Gary Johnson ballot access petition (as the persons responsible for the petition and for making substitutions) filed this brief in the Ohio Supreme Court. The case is State ex rel Fockler v Husted, 2016-1863. The state’s brief will be filed later this week. The case is being expedited because Ohio has some local partisan elections in 2017, and candidates filing in a 2017 primary must do so in February 2017.