Politico has this story about Robert Satiacum, Jr., a Democratic Party nominee for presidential elector in Washington state. Satiacum says he may not vote for Hillary Clinton in December, if he is elected to the electoral college.
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Nevada is one of six states in which Jill Stein is not on the ballot this year. The Observer has this story about the Nevada Green Party’s petition drive this year. It suggests that the professional petitioning company the party hired submitted fraudulent signatures, which of course greatly injured the Green Party. The publisher of The Observer is Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump.
South Dakota is one of four states that has never permitted write-in voting. This year, there is so much interest in write-in voting, especially for President, that South Dakota Secretary of State Shantel Krebs felt compelled to say, in a speech on October 10, that South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins. See this story.
The reason South Dakota doesn’t permit write-ins is that the 1891 legislative session, which passed a bill for government-printed ballots, wrote the law to bar write-ins. Back in the 1890’s and 1900’s decades, when state legislatures did that, state courts almost always ruled that ballots without write-in space are unconstitutional. Every state supreme court that considered the question, from the beginning of government-printed ballots in 1889, through 1989, always upheld write-in space, with the single exception of the South Dakota Supreme Court. State Supreme Courts in 20 states threw out write-in bans.
In 1901, a voter sued the Secretary of State of South Dakota over the write-in ban. Back then the South Dakota Supreme Court only had three members, and for that case, one of the three justices was unable to participate in the write-in case, Chamberlin v Wood, 88 NW 109. So only two members of the court heard the case, and they disagreed with each other. One justice voted to uphold the ban on write-ins, and the other voted to strike it down. On a tie, the statute survived.
The other states that never permitted write-in voting throughout history are Nevada, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. Louisiana permitted write-ins until the top-two system passed in 1975. Although Louisiana no longer uses top-two, it has never restored write-ins.
Charles T. Munger, Jr., has spent over $10,000,000 this year putting Proposition 54 on the ballot and advertising for it. See this story. Proposition 54 would prevent the legislature from voting on any bill unless it had been written and posted on the state legislature’s web page at least 72 hours previously.
Ironically, if this measure had been in effect in 2009, the legislature would not have been able to put the top-two measure on the ballot. Early in the morning of February 19, 2009, the legislature wrote the top-two constitutional amendment and passed it, between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. The legislature was meeting all night, trying to pass a budget. State Senator Abel Maldonado said in the middle of that night that he would vote for the budget, and thus enable it to pass, if the legislature first put his top-two proposal on the ballot. The bills to do that, SB 6 and SCA 4, passed before the public had any knowledge of these bills, and without any legislative hearings. Munger was the measure’s leading financial backer in 2010 when it was on the ballot as Proposition 14.
Many otherwise well-informed individuals do not remember, or never knew, how the top-two measure was put on the ballot. For instance, political scientist Seth Masket writes in his 2016 book, “The Inevitable Party”, that the 2010 ballot measure was an initiative put on the ballot with a petition campaign.
On October 12, Alaska Dispatch News released a poll for the U.S. Senate race. The results: Republican Lisa Murkowski 50%; Libertarian Joe Miller 18%; Democrat Ray Metcalfe 12%; independent Margaret Stock 7%; other 2%; undecided 11%. The two candidates who are on the ballot but who are not included in the poll are both independent candidates.
The Libertarian Party has never before had a nominee for either house of Congress who outpolled either a Democratic nominee or a Republican nominee.
However, in 1996, the Green Party nominee for U.S. Senate from Alaska, Ted Whittaker, outpolled his Democratic opponent.