Here are the election results for the August 18 by-election in Alberta, Canada. Because 214 candidates qualified, the elections office decided to print blank ballots, so that all votes were write-in votes. Each polling place had a list of all the qualified candidates.

Only seventeen candidates got as many as ten votes.

The reason there were so many candidates is that a group deliberately recruited as many candidates as possible, to protest the failure of the Canadian government to switch to some form of proportional representation, after decades of agitation. Canadian House of Commons candidates need 100 signatures, plus a filing fee of $1,000.

Here is a picture of the write-in ballot.

On August 18, the California Assembly amended ACA 8 to become a vehicle for redistricting U.S. House districts. The original bill did not relate to redistricting. Read it here. It does not take effect unless other states also redistrict in the next few years. It also endorses a U.S. Constitutional amendment to outlaw partisan redistricting. It has a hearing on August 19 in the Assembly Elections Committee, at 10:30 a.m.

The Assembly Elections Committee will also hear SB 280, which authorizes a special election on November 4, 2025, for voters to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment, assuming the legislature has passed it first. And the Committee will hold an informational hearing on AB 604, which has the new proposed U.S. House districts.

In July, the Forward Party in Utah and the United Utah Party, both of which were qualified parties, merged with each other, with the new name to be “Forward Party”. This is the first time two ballot-qualified parties in any state have merged since 1944, when the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the Minnesota Democratic Party merged.

Minnesota has never had registration by party, but Utah, by contrast, does have registration by party. The Utah elections office decided to automatically switch all the United Utah members to Foward Party members. No notification to each voter was made. The state assumed the party itself would inform its members of the change.

State registration numbers for active voters as of August 11 show 2,193 Forward Party members, and zero United Utah members. By contrast, before the merger, there had been 252 Forward members and 2,217 United Utah members.