On December 13, Tennessee filed this brief in Darnell v Hargett, 24-5856. This is the Libertarian Party lawsuit against the Tennessee procedure for a political party to qualify for the ballot, which is so difficult, it has not been used successfully since 1968 when the American Party and George Wallace qualified.

The state’s brief does not discuss the harm done to voters by the state’s policy. Because Tennessee has easy independent candidate procedures, minor parties always use those. But in Tennessee, candidates who use the independent procedure cannot have a partisan label on the ballot next to their names, other than the word “independent.” So the voters aren’t able to know which party the various candidates represent, unless they have the information from some source other than the ballot. Courts have been unanimous that voter confusion is an evil that should be avoided if at all possible.

The Delaware Election Commission has released this write-in tally from last month’s election.

For presidential candidates who were on the ballot in at least one state, the totals are: Jill Stein 914; Peter Sonski 98; Cornel West 96; Claudia De la Cruz 87; Shiva Ayyadurai 4. To get the totals, one must add up the county totals. Delaware only has three counties.

In the 2020 presidential election, 158,407,383 votes were cast for presidential candidates. In the 2024 election, now that all votes have been counted, we can know that only 155,627,481 votes were cast for president. So the decline was 2,779,902 votes.

This is the first time that the number of votes cast for president has dropped since the pair of elections 2008-2012. Like 2024, 2012 also saw a drop compared to four years earlier.

Unfortunately, all election return data for United States presidential elections is flawed. That is because some states don’t report the number of write-in votes cast for candidates who hadn’t filed to have their write-ins counted.