On November 9, a Democratic state representative in Kansas won a court order which will let her see the names of the approximately 150 people who cast provisional ballots in her district. The preliminary election returns show that she lost by 27 votes. However, there are provisional ballots that will be counted if the voter returns to the county elections office with certain information that the voter was unable to provide at the polls. The state legislator and her campaign want to contact those voters and assist them to validate their provisional ballots. See this story.

The Secretary of State and the elections officials resisted, because they believe it violates the privacy of those voters for anyone to know that they did, indeed, cast a provisional ballot.

On November 9, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Shelby County, Alabama v Holder, 12-96, over whether section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act is still constitutional. Section five is the part of the law that requires certain states and smaller jurisdictions to get approval from the U.S. Justice Department before changing any election law or practice.

The lower court, a 3-judge U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., had ruled in favor of section 5.

According to Greg Kaza, the Libertarian Party has again polled over 1,000,000 votes for its nominees for U.S. House across the nation. The party also did this in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, and 2010. The Libertarian Party is the only party to have polled over 1,000,000 votes for U.S. House, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, since the Progressive Party last did it in 1914.

Although the 2012 election returns are still only 90% counted, the Libertarian total is approximately 1,200,000 for U.S. House. It is somewhat surprising that the party did so well, since this year, for the first time since 1978, it had no nominees on the California ballot for Congress, due to California’s top-two primary system.