Pennsylvania has 67 counties. In Pennsylvania, all write-ins are legal (there is no procedure for write-in candidates to file in advance) and under the law, all should be tallied. However, once more, 17 counties have failed to include any write-ins from last month’s election, including the populous counties Cumberland, Lehigh, Luzerne, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.
On December 15, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue injunctive relief in Wrotnowski v Bysiewicz, the case concering Barack Obama’s qualifications that originated in Connecticut.
On December 13, California released its official vote tally from the November 2008 election. The most suspense concerned the write-in candidates for president. Ron Paul’s slate of presidential elector candidates received 17,006 write-ins. Chuck Baldwin received 3,145. James Harris for the Socialist Workers Party received 49, and Frank Moore (independent who lives in Berkeley, California) received 36. No one else had filed for write-in status for president.
These figures, and the final figures for the ballot-listed candidates, will be incorporated into the national presidential vote chart (above) on Tuesday evening.
The judge in the case called Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield said on December 11 that the decision will be out in late March or early April. This is the case over discriminatory aspects of the Connecticut public funding law.
The District of Columbia city council is elected on a partisan basis. When Congress passed the home rule law for D.C., it provided that two city council-at-large members should be elected in every even-numbered year. To guard against a City Council that consisted only of Democrats, the law also said that no party could run more than one candidate for City Council-at-Large. Traditionally, that made it possible for either a D.C. Statehood Party member, or a Republican, to be elected.
This year, Michael Brown (son of former Clinton cabinet member Ron Brown) won the non-Democratic Party seat. He had switched his voter registration to “independent” in May 2008, and qualified as an independent. But the Republican Party is suing the board, arguing that Brown has always been “affiliated” with the Democratic Party. Here is the Republican Party’s brief, filed December 12.
