Generally speaking, all states have finished tallying the votes from the November 2, 2010 election.  This year, every state that had a U.S. Senate election, or a gubernatorial election, has reported write-in results for at least some offices (except for the five states that ban all write-in votes), except for Pennsylvania and Washington.  Some states report the number of write-in votes for declared write-in candidates.  Some states report the total number of miscellaneous write-ins.  Some states do both.

Pennsylvania’s Elections Department said several weeks ago that it is working on a write-in tally for the November 2010 election, but that eight counties still had not reported their write-ins.  The issue has legal significance, because a federal lawsuit is pending in Pennsylvania for failure to tally the write-in votes for Cynthia McKinney (Green Party presidential nominee in 2008) and for the failure of certain counties to count any write-in votes in 2008.  The lawsuit argues that the 2008 failures are typical and ongoing.

Pennsylvania has no law requiring a write-in candidate to file a declaration of candidacy.  Under Pennsylvania law, all write-ins must be counted and reported.

The Colorado Republican State Central Committee is composed of party officers from each of the 64 counties, and Republican elected officials, and bonus members.  The bonus members for each county are based on how many people voted for the Republican nominee (for the office at the top of the ballot) in the last election.  The provision for bonus members says that for each 10,000 votes for the Republican nominee, that county gets another 2 bonus members.

The provision for bonus members is the only mechanism to make membership on the Central Committee roughly proportionate to population.  Because Colorado, like almost all states, has many relatively low-population counties and a much smaller number of high-population counties, a committee based entirely on county party officers and elected officials would give a huge majority on the Committee to the small-population counties.

This year, the Republican nominee for Governor only polled 199,034 votes, because most Republican voters voted for the Constitution Party nominee, Tom Tancredo.  A normal Republican gubernatorial vote in Colorado is approximately 800,000 votes.  As a result of the low vote for the Republican gubernatorial nominee, the Republican State Central Committee, which normally has approximately 400 members, has only 296 members, and they are disproportionately from low-population counties.  See this analysis at Craig Steiner’s blog.  In retrospect, the party ought to have made the formula dependent on the number of Republican registrants, instead of the gubernatorial vote.

The Peach Pundit has this commentary about Georgia ballot access, along with comment on Instant Runoff Voting and on electronic vote-counting machines that create an audit trail.  The Peach Pundit is a blog about Georgia politics.  Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link.