On November 15, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) introduced SJR 41, which would amend the U.S. Constitution to provide for a direct popular vote for President. Here is the text. It allows Congress to write ballot access laws for presidential candidates in the general election. It allows all adult U.S. citizens to vote for President, even if they reside in a U.S. territorial possession.
Here is an editorial in the San Jose Mercury News, endorsing the bill.
Heavy.com has this list of presidential electors. It is more interesting than the list last week from Politico. The Heavy.com list includes notes on the attitudes of some of the electors. For example, see Texas. The list also has the city of residence for electors from some of the states, and in a few cases notes on which office inside the Republican Party the elector holds.
On the day after the November 8, 2016 election, North Carolina State Board of Elections had reported a preliminary write-in count for Jill Stein of 509 write-ins. As counting is continuing, her total now stands at 1,506. See the current total. North Carolina State Board of Elections updates the vote totals daily.
The largest write-in total for president ever reported in North Carolina was in 1996, when Ralph Nader was credited with 2,108.
In 2016, Jill Stein was the only candidate who qualified to have write-ins tallied. Note that the Board of Elections is now reporting 56,945 other write-ins for president. It is unfortunate for historians and for all of us that the state will never tell us any further breakdown of this very large number of votes. In the middle of the night, November 8-9, someone at the State Board posted a write-in total of 17 votes for Bernie Sanders, but this was taken down shortly after it had been posted. Probably one county had counted them, and sent them in to the State Board of Elections, and then someone at the Board absently-mindedly put them into the state tally before realizing policy did not permit that. Certainly the true total of Bernie Sanders write-ins was in the thousands in North Carolina.
In 2012, North Carolina reported 11,537 miscellaneous write-ins, and 534 write-ins for Virgil Goode, the Constitution Party nominee, who was the only declared write-in presidential candidate in 2012.
Mark Wachtler of Opposition News has done the hard work to obtain the preliminary vote totals for each presidential candidate who was on the ballot in at least one state. Here are his totals. Most noteworthy is that Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism & Liberation placed seventh.
There will be substantial increases in the vote for candidates like Evan McMullin and Laurence Kotlikoff, two candidates who depended mostly on write-ins. Many states don’t report any write-in vote totals until the final official canvass is complete.
On November 16, the Wyoming Secretary of State finished the official canvass of the November 8, 2016 election. See it here. Wyoming in recent years has been the first state to finish, and it appears that is true again this year. Wyoming has the smallest population of any state.
The canvass show that 6,904 voters cast a write-in vote for president, but does not reveal who received those votes. The county election officials can probably provide this information, however. The write-in total is 2.70% of the total vote cast, and is greater than the number of votes received by three candidates who were on the ballot.
