At the November 7, 2007 election in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, six write-in candidates for local office won, even though they had ballot-listed opponents. See this story in the Scranton Times-Tribune. The article says that write-ins will be increasingly used in the county, now that the county no longer uses old-fashioned mechanical lever voting machines. One of the disadvantages of those machines was always the extreme difficulty of casting write-in votes. Another problem was the difficulty in counting them. Those machines are now illegal, under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, although New York state continues to use them in violation of the federal law.