The New York Times has this interesting story about ballot-qualified minor parties in New York. It focuses on the fairly rare instances when these parties have primaries in which all write-ins are counted (they are only counted if a particular type of petition has been filed in advance of the primary). It also says, near the bottom of the article, that write-ins are more common in primaries now than they were in the past. In the past, all New York state precincts used mechanical voting machines, and it was difficult for any voter to cast a write-in, when those machines were in use. A voter had to find a particular kind of lever on the machine to access the paper roll on which a write-in vote could be cast, and most voters didn’t know how to do that. But for the last decade, New York has used paper ballots, which makes it much easier to cast a write-in vote.