The Pennsylvania Bureau of Commissions, Elections and Legislation is still not finished compiling the tally of write-in votes cast in the November 2010 election for federal and state office, but it says that it will soon finish. All write-ins in Pennsylvania are valid votes, because the state has no law requiring write-in candidates to file a declaration of write-in candidacy. The state generally won’t furnish a write-in tally for write-in candidates, however. It furnished one for Ralph Nader for president in November 1996, and again for Ralph Nader in November 2004. It furnished one for Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin in 2008, but it arbitrarily did not furnish one for Green Party presidential nominee Cynthia McKinney the same year.
All minor party and independent candidates for statewide office who tried to get on the Pennsylvania ballot in 2010 were kept off the ballot by challenges or threats of challenges, so all of them asked that their write-ins be tallied. Pennsylvania was one of only 5 states in 2010 that had statewide elections, but which had only Democrats and Republicans on the statewide ballot. The others were Alabama, New Mexico, Kentucky, and Washington.