Ronald Miller was a write-in candidate for the Taylor, Michigan School District in November 2016. Shortly after the election, he checked the election returns in each precinct and learned that he had won one of the seats. However, when the city’s votes were officially tallied by the Wayne County Board of Commissioners, the Board excluded all write-ins in which his name wasn’t spelled properly. Therefore, the Board determined that he was not elected.
He sued to overturn the vote tally. On July 27, a state court agreed that Miller had been elected. See this story. For over 130 years, it is been basic law in the United States that the intent of the voter controls, when write-ins are being counted; perfect spelling is not required.
Taylor, Michigan, is a city of 63,000 population, near Detroit. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
See the infamous AK Murkowski write-in event for USA Senator – a major office.
Sometimes the intent of the voter can be difficult to determine. For instance, was a vote for “Kevin McMullin” actually a vote for Evan McMullin, or was there someone named Kevin McMullin (a fairly common name) who received a write-in vote for president?
True, intent can be unclear sometimes. But Michigan law says only votes for declared write-in candidates are to be counted — not that I’m a big fan of that section, but on this point I can see that it could avoid some problems of determining intent.
More importantly… how the hell does someone misspell “Ronald Miller?”
Someone not knowing how to spell “Murkowski” is understandable, but Miller is both a common and phonetic surname?
@John Anthony (or anyone else with experience with this),
I’m curious what happens in states without a Declaration of Write-in candidacy. What if Joe Smith works really hard with running a write-in campaign and wins, and then Joe Smith #2 who also lives in the same town claims that he was really the winner. How would that be decided?
Oregon SOS gives an example of a Joe Walton who made a public announcement that he was running, and says that votes for Joseph Walton should also be counted, because they can ascertain that it is the same person, but they say not to count a vote for J Walton because that might be for Jessica Walton.
This does not really answer your question, but I suspect that they would decide that the one who had publicly campaigned was the one the vote was for.
When the courts would not let Tom Delay off the ballot, the Republican candidate had to run as a write-in candidate. Her name was quite difficult to spell, and she had been elected to other offices using a different name. On most of the voting machines that were used, you type in the name of the candidate, using a virtual keyboard, so the names were digitized. Election officials were not permitted to program the computers to county any names (perhaps the actual spelling). But when they were tallying votes, once they accepted a particular spelling they could count all of them. One county had a 28-page list of names. The one county that used paper ballots had to project them one at a time so they could determine whether or not to count the vote.