No group of voters (except for ex-felons and felons, and residents the District of Columbia, and of the U.S. territorial possessions) is treated worse than voters who cast a write-in vote for president, even if the presidential candidate has filed for write-in status.
States don’t tally any write-in votes for president until December, and sometimes January. Certain areas of the country illegally don’t count them at all. Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia all refuse to provide a tally for the declared write-in candidates. In the case of the District of Columbia, this is especially egregious, since a D.C. court explicitly ordered such tallies for declared write-in presidential candidates, in 1975, in the aftermath of the Kamins v D.C. Board of Elections lawsuit. Also, in the case of Oregon, the State Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that the Oregon Constitution protects write-in votes.
New York city habitually fails to count any write-in votes for the declared write-in presidential candidates. The Board says it is too much work to take down the heavy rolls of paper from the mechanical voting machines and look at them. About 15 counties in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, also regularly fail to tally any write-in votes at general elections. A proposed lawsuit to challenge this behavior in Pennsylvania has been talked about for almost two years now, but the attorneys still have not filed it.