On November 5, Phillip Lyman received 200,551 write-in votes for Governor of Utah. He is an outgoing Utah Republican state legislator, and he had lost the Republican gubernatorial primary in June 2024. His write-in total amount to 13.57% of the general election vote.

Late in the general election campaign, another individual, Richard Lyman, had also filed as a write-in candidate for Governor. Phil Lyman sued Richard Lyman in state court, alleging that Richard’s campaign was a dirty trick so that if a voter just wrote in “Lyman”, intending to vote for Phil Lyman, the vote wouldn’t count because with two Lymans running as write-ins, election officials wouldn’t know which candidate the voter intended to support. The case was Phillip Lyman v Richard Lyman, Salt Lake County, 240908314. Richard Lyman then withdrew his write-in candidacy so as to settle the lawsuit.

Phillip Lyman, as a legislator, represented southeast Utah and campaigned on taking more control of federal wilderness land.

No one has ever been elected Governor of any state via write-in votes, in the entire history of government-printed ballots.

David Leip of the US Election Atlas here posts the latest presidential vote totals. They are complete, except that Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island still haven’t released the write-in tallies. It is not clear if Pennsylvania will ever do so. There is no write-in filing law in Pennsylvania, and sometimes the state reports totals for some candidates, but other times it doesn’t. In 2020 it reported that Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins got 1,282 write-ins. If Pennsylvania won’t do this for 2024, anyone is free to visit the Elections Office in Harrisburg and ask to see the Official Canvass sent in by each county to the state. Most counties tally the write-ins, although not all of them do.

Rhode Island, which also doesn’t have a write-in declaration law, typically reports all the presidential write-ins, but it takes months, and usually the report comes so late that some of the publications that publish national election returns have already gone to print.

Kansas is a laggard relative to releasing November 2024 election returns. Kansas has a declared write-in filing procedure, but still won’t release the state write-in totals. The Secretary of State’s office did tell the Green Party state chair that Jill Stein had received 1,773 write-ins, but he hasn’t released this information to the general public, nor has he released the totals for the other declared write-in candidates.

Furthermore, although his website gives the state totals for the candidates who were on the ballot, he hasn’t released the county-by-county numbers. And if someone tries to go to each county clerk website to get the individual county totals, one finds that some counties don’t have the information on their election website.

Several weeks ago I sent a Freedom of Information request to Kansas state government to get the county totals, but it has been ignored.

When one phones the Secretary of State’s office, one is told that only the State Elections Director can furnish the information, and he doesn’t return calls.