On November 18, Texas election officials discovered an error on one of the vote tallies for State Senate in last week’s election. The error awarded thousands of Democratic straight-ticket votes to the Libertarian in the race. See this story.
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On November 18, U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady heard arguments in De La Fuente v Alcorn, e.d., 1:16cv-1201. The state tried to persuade the judge to dismiss the case, but the judge declined. He also instructed De La Fuente to file an amended complaint in the next 30 days. The most important point in the lawsuit is whether there is any state interest in requiring candidates for presidential elector (for independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties) to reveal their full social security numbers before the petition may begin to circulate.
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.