At last month’s election, the only two candidates on the ballot for U.S. House, Kansas 3rd district, were Republican incumbent Kevin Yoder and Libertarian nominee Joel Balam. The district includes Wyandotte County, Kansas, which contains Kansas City, Kansas. In Wyandotte County, Balam polled 18,589 votes, and Yoder received 19,853 votes.

In the district as a whole, Balam received 92,675 votes, whereas Yoder received 201,087. Balam’s share of the vote in the district, 31.5%, is the best showing by a Libertarian for U.S. House in the party’s history. Here is Balam’s web page. He appears to have active involvement with veterans groups, and a church group. His mother was Hispanic and some of the content on the web page is in Spanish.

The second half of this article in the Arizona Daily Sun contains some information about campaign spending for and against Arizona’s Proposition 121, the top-two initiative that lost last month. The story quotes Paul Johnson, chief proponent of the initiative, as saying that he should have built a broader coalition in favor of his idea. Johnson says that is why it passed in California. Actually, it passed in California because it was described so poorly on the California ballot, and because proponents outspent opponents 20:1.

The Peace and Freedom Party ticket of Roseanne Barr for President and Cindy Sheehan for Vice-President’s best county in the U.S. was Trinity County, California. The ticket polled 1.18% in that county, which is a mountainous county just to the east of the Green Party’s best county in the U.S., Humboldt County.

The Barr-Sheehan ticket only appeared on the ballot in California, Colorado, and Florida. So far, write-ins for the ticket have been counted in Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Outside California, the ticket’s best county was Cheyenne County, Colorado, where it polled .91%. Cheyenne County is on the Kansas border.