This November 7 New York Times article says that turnout expert Curtis Gans believes between 126,000,000 and 128,500,000 voters voted in this election. But Professor Michael McDonald, another turnout expert, estimates 133,300,000 voters voted.
In 2004, the number of valid votes cast for president was 122,295,345. But in 2000 it was only 105,396,627. It thus seems clear that the 2004 election, not the 2008 election, had the more dramatic increase over the preceding election.
On November 7, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether or not to hear Ohio v Citizens for Tax Reform, 08-151. However, on November 10, the Court did not issue any order in that case. This means the Court hasn’t decided yet whether to hear the Ohio case. The issue is whether states may ban the practice of paying petition circulators on a per-signature basis. In this particular case, the 6th Circuit had invalidated Ohio’s law, based on substantial evidence that a ban on paying circulators on a per-signature basis makes petitioning significantly more expensive.
The Court’s next conference is November 14, and the next one after that is November 25.
The November 9 Minneapolis Star-Tribune has this op-ed in favor of Instant Runoff Voting. The author says that the U.S. Senate race, and two U.S. House races, in Minnesota, might have turned out differently if IRV had been used (although, in the case of the U.S. Senate race, no one knows yet who will ultimately win). Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link.
The op-ed has one minor factual error. It says Jesse Ventura was elected Governor as the Reform Party nominee in 1998 with only 36.7% of the vote. Actually he got 37.00% of the total vote cast for Governor.
Ralph Nader was an independent presidential candidate in 2008, and he did not seek the nomination of any nationally-organized party. But he did seek out the nomination of various parties that are just organized in one state. Also, in a few states, for pragmatic ballot-access purposes, he created new one-state parties.
In eight states, parties that nominated Nader are now ballot-qualified. The pre-existing parties are the Peace & Freedom Party of California, the Independent Party of Connecticut, the Independent Party of Delaware, the Ecology Party of Florida, and the Natural Law Party of Michigan. The parties created by Nader in 2008 are the Independent Party of Maryland, the Independent Party of New Mexico, and the Peace Party of Oregon. Two other parties created by Nader, the Independent Party of Hawaii and the Peace & Freedom Party of Iowa, are not now ballot-qualified because they didn’t poll enough votes.
The C-SPAN web page has a link to Associated Press data that shows the percentage of the vote for each ballot-listed presidential candidate, in each county of the nation. Go to www.c-span.org and choose “featured topics”. Then choose “Campaign 2008”. The right side of the page has a map of the United States. Click on any state to get the percentages within that state. Click on the state again, and the map enlarges so one can then click on any county and get county percentages. The percentages are only one digit to the right of the decimal point. Thanks to Jack Ross.
