Oregon and Washington vote entirely by postal mail. The Oregon Secretary of State, Kate Brown, recently told the U.S. Postal Service that if a voter sends in a ballot without enough postage, Oregon law requires that the post office not deliver that ballot to the elections office. The Postal Service responded with this October 31 letter. The Postal Service says the Postal Service is not bound by state election law and that the Postal Service will continue its policy of delivering ballots to election offices, even if the ballot arrives “postage due.” Presumably the motive of the Oregon Secretary of State is to save election administration costs.

In Oregon, ballots must arrive by the end of the day on election day, which is November 6 this year. Thanks to Dan Meek for the link. UPDATE: even though the postal service delivers these ballots, some Oregon counties are refusing to count ballots that arrive with postage due.

The Green Party nominee for U.S. House in New York’s 24th district, in Syracuse, has sent $4,250 in campaign contributions to charities and good-government non-profit groups, because she believes the donors gave her campaign the money because the donors want the Republican nominee in that district to win. See this story. Thanks to Green Party Watch for the link. The Republican nominee, the incumbent, is Ann Marie Buerkle and the donors have also contributed to Buerkle and other Republican campaigns recently.

The three ballot-listed candidates in this race have debated each other on television. See this story.

On November 2, the California Secretary of State published the voter registration tally as of October 22, 2012. The previous official state tally had been as of September 7. By far the most dramatic change between those two dates was the increase in the Libertarian registration, from 94,620 in September, to 108,736 in October. The party’s percentage of the total registration increased in 56 of the 58 counties; only two of California’s smallest-population counties, Mariposa and Mono, declined.

Unless the definition of “party” is amended, parties will go off the ballot in November 2014 unless they have registration of at least 1% of the number of votes cast in November 2014. No one can know what that number will be. But it probably will be less than 10,873,600, because the November 2010 turnout was 10,300,800. Therefore, the Libertarian Party can reasonably expect to meet the requirement, although any change in the party’s numbers by then is possible, in either direction.

Other parties that increased their share of the registration include the Democratic, American Independent, Americans Elect, and Justice Parties.
The number of voters registered “No party preference” declined slightly. Below are the September 2012 percentages, and the October 2012 percentages, for each party and for independents:

Democratic 43.33%, 43.66%
Republican 30.11%, 29.36%
Amer. Indp. 2.52%, 2.61%
Green .634%, .630%
Libertarian .548%, .596%
Peace & Freedom .343%, .340%
Amer. Elect .017%, .018%
non-qualified parties 1.22%, 1.84%
no party preference 21.28%, 20.94%

Among the unqualified parties, the Reform Party declined in raw numbers, the Justice Party increased in both raw numbers and percentagewise, and the Constitution Party increased in raw numbers but declined percentagewise.