The Pennsylvania Elections Commission will release a tally of all write-in votes from the November 2, 2010 election, during the first week of January 2011. It will cover all federal and state offices. All other states have already released their official vote totals from that election, except for a handful of states in which the gubernatorial vote is never “official” until the state legislature has convened and approved the returns.
The December 29 issue of the Albany Times-Union has this editorial, condemning New York state’s present law for recounts, which sets out no objective standards on when a recount should be held. The editorial was responding to the decision of the highest state court, ruling that no recount should be held in the race for State Senate, 7th district. The margin was 451 votes out of 85,405 cast. The control of the State Senate rested on that one race.
One of the strongest points in the editorial is that it is absurd that New York switched to a system that has an audit trail, if no one is going to use the audit trail. The old voting system in New York was mechanical voting machines. Recounts are impossible in places that use mechanical voting machines. One can double-check the tallies shown on the back of the machine, but one can’t recount anything because there is nothing to recount. But in 2010 New York switched to paper ballots, which can be recounted.
This UPI story explains the lawsuit Cao v Federal Election Commission, which the U.S. Supreme Court may or may not decide to hear. The case, filed jointly by former Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao and the Republican National Committee, challenges the part of the McCain-Feingold law that limits how much money parties can spend on their own speech, if that speech is coordinated with one of the party’s candidates and appears to help that candidate. Thanks to HowAppealing for the link.
This story in an English-language newspaper in Ankara, Turkey, explains how political parties are financed in Turkey, and the same article gives the same information for many countries in Europe as well.
The Right to Life Party of New York state ceased to be a qualified party in November 2002. However, since then, it has placed a few candidates on the November ballot, in State Supreme Court races, which are partisan elections in New York. These candidates have only appeared on the ballot in Westchester County and its smaller neighboring counties in the Hudson River Valley.
In November 2010, the party ran two candidates, James Alexander Burke, who was not the nominee of any other party; and Matthew J. Byrne, who was also a Republican nominee. Burke received 9,409 votes, or 1.88%. Byrne received 5,572 votes on the Right to Life line, or 1.11%.
These results are low, relative to what that party received in judicial and other partisan races in the past. The party first ran judicial candidates in 1979, and averaged 6.09% of the vote across the state. The only year in which the party polled a lower percentage than in 2010 was 2004, when its sole judicial candidate received 1.39%.
