Some counties in New York state have tallied the number of write-in votes. The returns for those counties suggest approximately 1% of voters cast a write-in vote for president. If that holds for the entire state, there will probably be 80,000 write-ins when all results are tallied.

Among the five boroughs of New York city, Manhattan (New York County) is the only one with a write-in tally so far. The percentage there is 1.9% of the total, or 11,421 write-ins. This news story has the presidential results by county, but obviously many counties have not finished the write-in tally because they show zero write-ins.

New York was the only state with two presidential candidates on the ballot, a shocking fact that the New York mainstream news media have ignored for several months. Finally, on November 4, the day before the election, Spectrum News 1 covered the news. See this story. Spectrum News 1 is a group of television stations, all in western New York.

The first time the U.S. Supreme Court ever struck down a ballot access law was in Ohio in 1968, in Williams v Rhodes. The key fact in that case, weighing against Ohio, was that Ohio that year had been the only state with only two presidential candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court has said twice that if a ballot access law is so harsh that it is almost never used, it is almost certainly unconstitutional. So the fact of New York’s exclusionary ballot is of great legal significance, and it ought to be a fact of great public interest inside New York. Yet so far none of the state’s print newspapers has mentioned it.

On November 5, the Working Class Party polled enough votes to become ballot-qualified for 2026 in the Illinois Fourth U.S. House district. Ed Hershey polled 5.11% of the vote, meeting the 5% vote test.

Although Illinois has some of the worst ballot access laws in the nation for minor parties and independents, Illinois does allow parties to become ballot-qualified in just part of the state, if they meet the vote test in that portion of the state.

Hershey was running against both a Democrat and a Republican. This is the first time the Working Class Party has attained qualified party status anywhere in the U.S., other than in Maryland and Michigan.