On November 5, minor party and independent candidates for U.S. Senate received 3.3% of the total vote cast for U.S. Senate. This does not include write-in votes. Also this only includes the 33 regularly-scheduled Senate elections, not special elections.

Ten of the 33 states with U.S. Senate elections had no minor party or independent candidate on the ballot. Obviously if all 33 states had had minor party or independent candidates, the “other” total would have been significantly higher.

The states with only a Republican and a Democrat on the ballot for U.S. Senate were: California, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

On December 17, presidential electors are meeting in state capitols to choose the president. Although not all state meetings have been held, so far there are no “disobedient” presidential electors.

James Moyer wrote a book several years ago, explaining to readers that in the past, voters could vote for individual candidates for presidential elector. The book is “Winner-Takes-All: The Secret History of the Electoral College.” By 1984, voters in all states had lost this ability. Vermont and Louisiana had been the last states to let voters cast votes for individual elector candidates.

Now Moyer has put up a webiste about this. See it here. If one goes to the website, one can play a very clear ten-minute youtube that furnishes the information that is in the book.

If ballots still let voters vote for each individual elector candidate, the law on presidential qualifications would be much clearer than it is now. Most states won’t print the names of presidential candidates on their ballots if that candidate doesn’t meet the constitutional qualifications. But if people understood that the true candidates in November are the elector candidates, that policy would change. Back in 1892, when the Prohibition Party nominated a 33-year-old for vice-president, no state kept the ticket off the ballot, and the Prohibition Party was on every government-printed ballot in the nation, except for South Dakota; and the South Dakota omission had nothing to do with the qualifications issue.