According to each of the 58 county election departments of California, current registration data for each qualified party is: Democratic 7,921,721; Republican 5,216,494; American Independent 475,281; Green 112,881; Libertarian 109,618; Peace & Freedom 61,506; Americans Elect 3,413; unqualified parties and miscellaneous 352,775; no party preference (formerly called “Declines to state”) 3,459,782.

The California Secretary of State will soon release a new registration tally, and that tally won’t match these figures exactly. These figures were obtained by contacting each county elections office. Some counties were more easily able to forward the February 10, 2013 tally data, whereas other counties were not able to do that easily, and so just gave the current tally, which would as of some date in the first twelve days of March 2013. By contrast, when the Secretary of State releases her report, the totals for all counties will be the February 10, 2013 data.

The number of registered voters dropped to 17,713,471. This is because many counties have purged voters who have not voted in either of the last two statewide elections. The purge in Orange County was especially severe, and registration dropped from 1,683,001 in October 2012 to 1,397,665. Orange County registration will rise in the next few weeks as some of the voters who received the postcard will respond that yes, they are still at the same address.

Every qualified political party in California now has a higher share of the registration than it did on the last state tally, the October 22, 2012 tally. The only category that declined as a percentage are the No Party Preference voters, formerly known as Declines to State voters, and also known as independent voters. In raw numbers, because the state registration as a whole declined, all the parties have fewer registered voters now than they did in October 2012, except that the Libertarian Party and Americans Elect have more than they did then. The current total for those two parties is the highest in the history of each of them.

Burlington, Vermont, held a partisan city election on March 5. Each of the seven wards elected a city council member. Progressives were elected in Wards Two and Three; Democrats in Wards Four, Five, Six, and Seven; and an independent was re-elected in Ward One.

Each ward has two city council members, and each member is elected for two years. The city holds elections every year. Because the Progressives also elected two city council members in 2012, there are now four Progressives on the council, up from three. The election also included one Libertarian and one Green, although they did not win. Here is a link to a news story.

On March 11, the Maryland Senate passed SB 279, which lets unregistered individuals register to vote at early voting locations, and then they could vote immediately afterwards. This isn’t quite election-day registration, but comes close.