The Federal Election Commission has just released its book, “Federal Elections 2008”, which has election returns for President and Congress. There is no publication that takes greater pains to capture write-in votes. Even Congressional Quarterly’s “America Votes” doesn’t include, for example, the Rhode Island November 2008 presidential write-ins. Rhode Island is one of the states that doesn’t have a write-in declaration of write-in candidacy form, so the state tallies all write-ins. The book reveals that in Rhode Island, Hillary Clinton received 655 write-ins, and Ron Paul received 472 write-ins.

Copies of the book are free and are available from the FEC, phone 800-424-9530.

On October 21, the Virginia State Board of Elections voted to count the disputed 2,000 overseas ballots cast in the November 2008 election. A U.S. District Court earlier this month had ordered the Board to count them. They had not been counted previously because state law says they arrived too late, but the court ruling said the state should have mailed them out earlier.

It will be interesting to see how the results compare to the statewide vote as a whole. The results will show if overseas absentee ballots differ politically from regular Virginia voters.

It is still possible that the state will appeal the ruling to the 4th circuit. If the state has decided to appeal, it has not yet made this known to the public.

The Moderate Party, the only ballot-qualified party in Rhode Island other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, has announced that it has formed town committees in 17 of Rhode Island’s municipalities. Rhode Island only has 39 municipalities. The party says it is organizing additional committees in more places. The places in which the party already has committees are Barrington, Bristol, Burrillville, Coventry, Cranston, Cumberland, East Greenwich, Foster, Glocester, Jamestown, Lincoln, Narragansett, North Kingston, Providence, Scituate, Warwick, and West Warwick.