Pennsylvania holds a special election on March 21 to fill the vacant state house seat, 197th district, in Philadelphia. With no Democrat on the ballot, and the Green Party nominee also not on the ballot, only a Republican is on the ballot. But only 5% of the district’s voters are registered Republicans. This has led to many individuals campaigning as write-in candidates, according to this story.
Pennsylvania has no write-in filing procedure. All write-ins must be counted, under the law, although in the recent past Philadelphia election officials have violated the law and ignored all write-ins.
Whichever write-in candidate the local Democratic Party backs will win. The Green will not win.
Who will watch the counting of all those write-in ballots? People who wrote in candidates? A hundred? A thousand?
I’m wondering about the mechanics of the write-in procedure. Will they use paper ballots or vote on machines. If on machines, then the counting and perhaps recounting of the write-in votes will be curious.
It may depend on the type of voting machine. In the voting machine I used, you select “Write-in” and are presented a virtual keyboard. You then select one letter at a time. They end up with a digitized spelling.
When counting, they can look at each unique spelling and determine if it is a vote for one of the candidates who have filed for write-in status. That won’t work since Pennsylvania does not require filing for write-in status.
I’m wishing the best of luck to an Honkala win. She certainly deserves it more than most others running.
I would love if another party found someone with the same name as one of the write in candidates, then if they won, contested the results saying there was no way of knowing which “Cheri Honkala” voters intended
Ha, is there any case of anything like that happening? I mean in general. How would they resolve it if two ‘qualified’ (depending on the state) write-in’s had the same name?
The problem of two people with the same name isn’t just a potential problem with write-in votes. Sometimes it happens for candidates who are on the ballot, both with the same name. Luckily for Cheri Honkala, she has an extremely rare name, and seems to be the only person in Pennsylvania with that name. Anywho.com only lists two other people with that name in the entire USA.
Something like this happened in Detroit a dozen years ago or so; see these articles (among other resources) on the real campaign of Maureen Taylor and the spoiler effort of Marino Taylor:
http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2005.09/PT.2005.09.6.html
http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/currie-ing-disfavor/Content?oid=2183059