At the November 2012 election, Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode received 419 write-ins for President in Pennsylvania. This information is from the official county election returns that were submitted to the Secretary of State. Because state employees did not tabulate them, two volunteers from the Constitution Party themselves examined the returns and tallied the state total. The volunteers note that ten of the 67 counties failed to mention any presidential write-ins at all.

The Goode write-ins should be considered the only valid write-in votes for President, because Virgil Goode is the only presidential candidate who was not on the ballot in Pennsylvania, but who did submit a list of presidential elector candidates. He submitted a slate of presidential elector candidates when he submitted his petition. Pennsylvania general election presidential petitions must contain such a list of presidential elector candidates.

Missouri holds local elections on April 2. According to this article, some jurisdictions in Missouri will ask voters to sign in on i-pads instead of old-fashioned poll books. Thanks to Ken Bush for the link.

On April 1, Steve Wailand sued the City of Macomb, Illinois, because the city refuses to acknowledge that he won the February 26 election for Alderman, 2nd district. There were only two candidates: Wailand, who got 17 votes, and incumbent Kay Hill, who got 16 votes. The city election rules say that candidates who get a majority in the February election are elected, but if no one got a majority, there is a run-off on April 9.

The city says Wailand didn’t get enough votes to have a true majority. Even though he got 51.51%, the city says “majority” really means one vote more than 50%. However, this policy is not written down anywhere. The case is Wailand v City of Macomb, 9th judicial district, 13MR46. See this story. Here is some commentary about the situation by Ed Woell, who teaches history at Western Illinois University.

Macomb has a population of 22,086, and is in west central Illinois. It has seven wards, and two more aldermen are elected at-large. As it obvious from the vote totals, the turnout was extremely low (3%). Thanks to Phil Huckelberry for the link to the news story.