In observance of the Winter Holiday season, there will not be a blog post coming this coming Thursday, December 24th. Hope you all have a safe, healthy, and happy holiday season wherever you live, and regardless of what holidays you observe! The next, and last regular post of the year will come out next Sunday, December 27th.
Introduction: Today's post will be somewhat less serious and formal than normal posts, but will still relate to one of this blog's normal areas of focus. As the name implies, "Write-In Votes" refer to votes inputted by voters for a candidate in a race who is not present on that election's ballot for that race.
Works Cited:
Nathan Parmeter
20 from 2020: America's Weirdest Write-in Votes
Introduction: Today's post will be somewhat less serious and formal than normal posts, but will still relate to one of this blog's normal areas of focus. As the name implies, "Write-In Votes" refer to votes inputted by voters for a candidate in a race who is not present on that election's ballot for that race.
Currently, 41 states allow voters to write-in a candidate for any race, although 33 of these states require a write-in campaign to be registered to be on the ballot. If a candidate is not registered in time, but is inputted as a vote, that vote for that race is disqualified ("What is"). A notable successful example of the latter occurred in 2010, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) lost the Republican primary, but won the seat due to a write-in campaign organized by the Senator (Rosen). Along with formal write-in candidates, 8 states (Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and Wyoming) allow voters to input anyone (or, as we will see later, anything) for an elected position ("What is"). Four years ago, Vermont voters were "Feeling the Bern" so much that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who lost the 2016 Democratic primaries, won 6% of the statewide vote in the 2016 presidential election in the form of write-ins (Kinzel). Allowing voters to input anyone (or anything) as a write-in vote has resulted in some weird, humorous, funny and/or unusual write-in votes being submitted and published. This post will go over some of the weirdest, funniest, and most unique American write-in votes from the 2020 elections.
Methodology: The inspiration for this post came from seeing multiple post-election Tweets pointing out unusual, funny, or weird write-in votes from across the country. In the process of preparing this post, I extensively browsed through dozens of county elections websites in states that allow voters free range on write-in candidates. Unfortunately, all of the potentially-eligible counties I independently searched up did not publicly tabulate individual write-in votes for the 2020 elections. As such, because all of the write-in votes presented here were originally tweeted-out or reported on by others, I will provide credit to both the original poster(s), and the election results as part of this article.
As an exception to this blog's normal style, as today's content is less serious and formal, I will be including personal comments (some humorous and some serious) about each write-in vote profiled below.
WARNING: If you haven't seen Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker yet and want to see it to find out the plot and ending, there is a major spoiler below.
Table 1: 20 of America's Weirdest 2020 Write-in Votes
Notes: Obviously, this is not a complete list of all funny write-in ballots from these jurisdictions, much less America as a whole. The different cases are not listed in any particular order. Finally, if any of you reading this happen to share the same name as one of these write-in ballots, and you take offense to any of my comments towards the write-in ballot candidate name, please let me know and I will change it.
Credit goes to @JacksonMartin for tweeting out about Sedgwick County's write-in vote results, @NikDeCostaPilpa for tweeting Vermont's, and @ohheckerman for communicating New Jersey's. Seeing their original tweets from last month not only inspired this article, but provided some results to start with, as I wasn't sure how many jurisdictions tabulate all write-in votes by candidate, including funny and/or unusual ones.
Why write-in unusual, weird, or funny candidates? In general, political scientists and sociologists have identified lack of trust in the system and politics as a reason for voters writing in unusual or un-normal candidates for elected positions. With that in mind, voters who vote this way on their ballots do so to express discontent with the system and/or the two-party candidates running in the respective race(s) (Angel; McDonald). In particular, votes for religious figures or deities can be used to express both a distrust of politics and support for religion and religious values (Angel).
(and yes, some probably want to be funny through their write-in votes) (Angel).
Election Results:
"Summary Results Report Sedgwick County, KS November 3, 2020." Sedgwick County, 16 Nov. 2020, www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/58034/el45-election-summary.pdf. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
"Vermont Election Night Results." Vermont Secretary of State, electionresults.vermont.gov/Index.html#/state. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Works Cited:
@JacksonMartin. "Decided to comb though the Sedgwick County Kansas Presidential write in votes and pick out my favorites, so here they are: All with only 1 vote "FUCK THEM ALL" "VOTING AT POLE" "OTHER" "YESHUA/JESUS" (not to be confused with "JESUS") "PEROT" "HARRY S TRUMAN" "NO COMFIDENCE"." Twitter, 17 Nov. 2020, 9:32pm, twitter.com/JacksonMartinKS/status/1328934190822395904. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
@NikDeCostaKilpa. "god bless the state of vermont for publishing each and every one of its presidential write-in votes https://electionresults.vermont.gov/Index.html#/federal." Twitter, 9 Nov. 2020, 2:28pm, twitter.com/NikDeCostaKlipa/status/1325928186568466432. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
@ohheckerman. "burlington county write in votes sure are something." Twitter, 19 Nov. 2020, 6:37am, twitter.com/ohheckerman/status/1329433694881406980. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Angel, Greg. ""Baby Yoda," "Batman," "None of the Above" Among Florida Voters's Presidential Picks." Spectrum News 13, 17 Nov. 2020, www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2020/11/17/write-in-candidates-florida-include-mickey-mouse-kanye-bernie-sanders. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
"Electoral College & Indecisive Elections." United States House of Representatives, history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Electoral-College/. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.
Evon, Dan. "Was the Kids’ TV Show ‘Paw Patrol’ Canceled?" Snopes Fact Check, 11 Jun. 2020, www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-paw-patrol-get-canceled/. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Kinzel, Bob. "Vermont's Vote: Record-Breaking Early Ballots, and Over 18,000 Write-Ins for Bernie." Vermont Public Radio, 15 Nov. 2016, www.vpr.org/post/vermonts-vote-record-breaking-early-ballots-and-over-18000-write-ins-bernie#stream/0. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Lajka, Arijeta. "Election breathes new life into false ‘dead voter’ claims." Associated Press, 10 Nov. 2020, apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-election-dead-voter-claims-fc7ba254fd37059f63ea764c18c2a4cb. Accessed 20 Dec. 2020.
McDonald, Terrence T. "Nixon, Rick Astley, 'Ur mom' — 13K NJ voters skipped Biden and Trump and wrote these in instead." Bergen Record, 27 Nov. 2020, www.northjersey.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/27/rick-astley-ur-mom-kanye-nj-voters-write-in-presidential-votes/6355043002/. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Rosen, Yereth. "Senator Lisa Murkowski wins Alaska write-in campaign." Reuters, 17 Nov. 2010, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-elections-murkowski/senator-lisa-murkowski-wins-alaska-write-in-campaign-idUSTRE6AG51C20101118. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Schinella, Tony. "Voters Scatter Serious, Funny Write-ins Throughout Their Ballots." Concord, New Hampshire Patch, 14 Nov. 2020, patch.com/new-hampshire/concord-nh/voters-scatter-serious-funny-write-ins-throughout-their-ballots. Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
"What is a write-in candidate? (2020)." Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/What_is_a_write-in_candidate%3F_(2020). Accessed 19 Dec. 2020.
Nathan Parmeter
Author and Host, The Parmeter Politics and Policy Record
No comments:
Post a Comment