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.
“Drop-off”, in the study of elections, means the share of voters who cast a ballot but don’t complete the ballot. For U.S. Senate, in November 2016, the California drop-off was 16.20%. In other words, almost one-sixth of the voters who cast a ballot didn’t bother to vote for U.S. Senate, which was the second item on the ballot, just after president.
This is undoubtedly because the November 2016 California ballot forced voters to either vote for one of two Democrats, or not to vote for U.S. Senate at all. This happened because of Proposition 14, the top-two system, which has been in effect in California since 2011.
The drop-out rate for U.S. Senate in California in the past 75 years has been:
2016 16.20%
2012 4.72%
2010 2.92%
2006 4.02%
2004 4.26%
2000 4.66%
1998 3.55%
1994 4.34%
1992 5.05%
1988 4.42%
1986 2.87%
1982 3.21%
1980 5.10%
1976 8.17%
1974 4.12%
1970 2.13%
1968 3.55%
1964 2.64%
1962 4.75%
1958 .95%
1956 3.36%
1954 4.19%
1952 12.81%
1950 4.15%
1946 4.35%
1944 7.33%
Years not mentioned above had no U.S. Senate election.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has posted this useful calendar of when each state’s legislature will come into session in 2017. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
