David Nir, at Daily Kos, has collected the congressional and gubernatorial races last week in which the winner polled less than 50% of the vote. He tries to analyze which major party was helped by the presence of the minor party and independent candidates in the race. See here.
Now is the time for anyone who is unhappy with his or her state’s election laws to ask a state legislator, or a legislator-elect, to introduce bills in the 2013 sessions of that state’s legislature.
Deadline vary tremendously, but some states have very early deadlines for legislators to introduce bills. Indiana requires bills in the 2013 session to have been introduced by late 2012.
As far as is known, activists in the following states are already working on getting ballot access bills introduced: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Georgia Libertarians ought to be seeking a change in the law, to enable the party to run candidates for U.S. House, legislature, and county partisan office. The Georgia law, making it virtually impossible for the Libertarian Party to run for these offices, is absurd, when one considers that statewide Libertarian nominees in partisan elections carried counties in both 2008 and 2012, and polled over one-third of the vote in one statewide partisan race last week.
Rob Richie has this Washington Post op-ed, deploring the November 2012 results for U.S. House, in which the party that polled the second-highest number of votes for U.S. House across the nation ended up with a majority of House seats. The op-ed advocates more proportional voting systems for U.S. House.
The Georgia Secretary of State’s office says not all counties have forwarded the write-in totals for the declared write-in candidates, so even though the Secretary’s web page purports to have the final results, they really aren’t final yet. Until the write-in results come in, no one can even know the precise number of votes cast in Georgia for President or any other office. The Secretary of State hopes to have the complete results by Thanksgiving.
On November 15, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) introduced S3635, which provides incentives to states to solve the problem that in many places, voters had to stand in line at the polls for hours. See this Roll Call story. The text of the bill is not yet posted to the web page for the Library of Congress. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
