Darryl W. Perry has recently published a book “Duopoly: How the Republicrats Control the Electoral Process”, which is available on Amazon. Normally this blog doesn’t carry book reviews, although the printed Ballot Access does. However, “Duopoly” is too useful not to be publicized in both places.

The book has five appendices, each containing valuable statistical data that is not easy to find elsewhere. Appendix One is especially useful. It is titled, “Congressional Re-election Rates for U.S. House of Representatives”. It covers the entire period 1789 to the present. It shows, for each regularly-scheduled election, the number of seats, the number of open seats, the number of members seeking re-election, the number being re-elected, and then shows percentages for each of the last two categories. At a glance, once can see that re-election rates have increased in the modern era, relative to the past when elections were less regulated. In 1874, only 58.3% of the incumbents who were running for re-election were re-elected. Other years in which re-election rates were below 70% were 1842, 1854, 1862, 1890, 1894, and 1932. By comparison, starting in 1950, there has never been an election with that percentage being lower than 85%.

The book also has re-election rates for the Canadian House of Commons, 1869 to the present, showing Canadian elections are much more likely to result in a high turnover. Canada has equal and tolerant ballot access laws for all candidates, unlike the U.S.

There is much, much more that is useful in this book, and a future paper edition of B.A.N. will review the book in more detail.

This Roll Call article says that the failure of the Ohio legislature to advance HB 369 this week means that the state will indeed hold its presidential primary and its primary for U.S. House on June 12. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.

The Louisiana Secretary of State posts new voter registration totals on his web page every month, but those statistics never include any parties except the Democratic and Republican Parties, even though Louisiana has five qualified parties. However, on November 3, his office issued a report that shows how many registered voters there are in each party, including even the unqualified parties.

The new totals, converted to percentages, for the five qualified parties, are: Democratic 49.44%; Republican 26.89%; Libertarian .17%; Reform .05%; Green .05%. Independent voters, plus those registered in unqualified parties, equal 23.41%.

A year ago, the percentages were: Democratic 50.62%; Republican 26.21%; Libertarian .13%; Reform .05%; Green .04%; independents plus miscellaneous 22.95%.

The monthly totals for the two major parties show that the Democratic Party dipped below 50% of all registered voters for the first time at the June 1, 2011 tally, and has continued to make very slow declines since then.

A party becomes ballot-qualified when its registration reaches at least 1,000, and also when it submits a list of its officers, its bylaws, and a fee of $1,000. The only three unqualified parties that are organized, and that have even 50 registrants, are the Conservative Party with 396 registrants, the Constitution Party with 137 registrants, and the Socialist Party with 62 registrants. Thanks to Randall Hayes, who obtained the full registration report.