Late on Wednesday, November 14, U.S. District Court Judge J. Thomas Marten, a Clinton appointee, ruled that nothing in federal law prohibits the release of names of voters who cast a provisional ballot. The decision is a victory for Democratic legislative nominee Ann Mah, who is trailing by 44 votes in her race, but who desired to contact the voters who had cast a provisional ballot (the provisional ballots hadn’t been counted yet), to assist them and motivate them to complete the provisional ballot process.

Most of these provisional ballots were apparently cast by voters who didn’t have the proper government photo-ID at the polls. Their votes won’t count unless they return to the county elections office after the election and show a proper ID.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach personally argued the case, which is Mah v Shawnee County Commission, 12-cv-4148. He said that if the names of provisional ballots could be known to the public, that would make it possible to deduce whom those voters voted for, especially in a small-population county. For example, he said that if Mitt Romney’s total vote increased by ten votes, after the ten provisional ballots had been counted (whereas President Obama’s total did not increase at all), then anyone could deduce that all ten provisional voters had voted for Romney. This is hypothetically true, but not very likely, and not germane to this particular instance, when there are over 100 provisional ballots.

This year, Americans Elect became a fully-qualified party in twenty-eight states; also it became ballot-qualified just for President in Alaska and Arkansas. Of those twenty-eight states, nineteen have registration by party. The number of voters who registered as members of Americans Elect is interesting, because the national office of Americans Elect did not encourage voters to register into the party, so the voters who changed their registration were generally acting on their own.

There is no registration data for Delaware, Nevada, and North Carolina for Americans Elect. Delaware simply included all Americans Elect in the “other” category and never bothered to tally them. Nevada followed the same policy. North Carolina State Board of Elections told the counties to convert all Americans Elect registrants to independents, and says it has no data about how many voters ever registered into Americans Elect.

For the other sixteen states, the number of registered voters during 2012 in Americans Elect will be included in the December 1 print edition of Ballot Access News, in a chart that will show the number of registered voters in each qualified party in each state as of the close of registrtion before the election.

Here is a link to the November 2012 exit poll data. The data shows that whereas only 1% of self-identified Democrats voted for a presidential candidate other than President Obama and Mitt Romney, and only 1% of self-identified Republicans voted for a presidential candidate other than Obama and Romney, 5% of the self-identified independent voters voted for another presidential candidate.

Because independent voters are the voters most likely to vote for minor party candidates, this data shows that a top-two system, which keeps minor party candidates off the November ballot, injures independent voters more than it hurts Republican and Democratic voters.

The data also shows 50% of independent voters voted for Romney, and only 45% of them voted for Obama.

The data shows that 38% of the voters self-identified as Democrats, 32% as Republicans, and 29% as independents.

The data shows that 3% of liberals, and 3% of moderates, voted for a minor party presidential candidate; but only 1% of conservatives voted for a minor party candidate.

The data shows that only 5% of the voters think foreign policy is the most important issue in the presidential election. But among those 5% of voters, 11% of them voted “other” for President.