On December 13, the California Secretary of State released the final official vote totals. The only declared presidential write-in candidate, Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party, received 2,939. In 2020 the party’s presidential nominee had polled 2,605 write-ins in California.

Cornel West and Shiva Ayyadurai, presidential candidates who filed for write-in status in most of the states in which they were not on the ballot, did not file in California because the write-in filing procedure is so difficult. It requires the candidate to recruit 54 candidates for presidential elector, and 54 more candidates for alternate presidential elector. All 108 individuals must fill out a notarized declaration form. This law is discriminatory, because presidential elector candidates for parties that are on the ballot do not need to file any paperwork. Instead their party simply files a list containing their names and addresses with the Secretary of State.

The Georgia Libertarian Party has been in federal court ever since 2017, in its lawsuit against the law on how a minor party can run a U.S. House candidate. As this website has repeatedly said, the Georgia law for U.S. House ballot access for independent candidates and the nominees of parties that didn’t poll 20% of the vote for president is the worst ballot access law in the nation. No third party has ever been able to overcome since it was created in 1943.

The party’s Eleventh Circuit brief is due January 17, 2025. The case had almost completely lost, but the equal protection argument had still been alive, and then the legislature earlier this year amended the law to give the case a stronger argument. The new Georgia law lets a minor party on the ballot for president automatically if its presidential nominee is on in 20 other jurisdictions. This new law completely undercuts the state’s argument that it has a compelling interest in keeping all candidates off the ballot who aren’t extremely well-supported. The new presidential law means a candidate may be on the Georgia ballot for president even if he or she has no support whatsoever in Georgia.

The U.S. District Court refused to let the party amend its Complaint to take coognizance of the new law, so the appeals court will be asked to reverse that decision.