This Detroit News story says Republican presidential electors in Michigan are getting lots of communications. Some of it is friendly and tries to persuade them to vote for someone other than Donald Trump. Others are hostile and even threatening. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
On November 15, China held elections for local legislative bodies. The Chinese Constitution says anyone who has not been convicted of a crime, and who is an adult citizen, may run. But in practice, only candidates approved by the Communist Party may run. The BBC tried to interview an independent candidate, but when the BBC team went to the residence of the independent, 25 plain clothes police prevented the candidate from leaving her house to speak to the BBC reporters. When she tried to speak from the interior, out a window, the police covered up the window. They also put their bodies and hands in from of the camera to prevent filming. See this story, which has a riveting film of the incident.
UPDATE: this article says many write-in votes were cast in the November 15 elections.
The California Secretary of State’s election returns book, “Statement of Votes”, only includes write-in votes for declared write-in presidential candidates, and does not ever mention the number of write-ins cast for other write-in candidates. However, this newspaper story reveals that in Kings County, there were a total of 572 write-in votes for President, 1.7% of the total vote cast for president.
When the Statement of Votes for California is published, there will be no way to know this number. The Statement of Votes will mention the 106 write-ins for Bernie Sanders, and the 81 for Evan McMullin, because they were declared write-in candidates, but it will not mention the other number.
Kings County is in the San Joaquin Valley and has a population of 152,982.
The Jill Stein write-in in North Carolina is now 3,468, triple what had been reported yesterday. The number keeps rising as election officials examine the write-in ballots to see how many she has. She was the only declared write-in candidate for president in North Carolina. See here. Thanks to Kevin Hayes for the link.
The previous high write-in vote for president in North Carolina had been Ralph Nader’s 1996 total, but Stein has now surpassed that.
This article by Tosten Burks in Good Magazine says that the outlook that more state legislatures will approve the national popular vote plan is favorable. The article says this is because many Republican-majority state legislatures are warming up to the plan, because these states are not “swing” states and as a result, these non-swing states get mostly ignored in the presidential campaign.
Good Magazine was founded in 2006.
