The New York State Board of Elections website shows 102,231 write-ins were cast for President last week. The State Board still hasn’t got the number of write-ins for each of the declared write-in presidential candidates. But the very large number of write-ins shows that election officials have gone to a great deal of work, and will continue until the tally is done. Each one of those write-ins must be examined by an election administration employee. This is far more expensive and time-consuming than processing votes for candidates whose names are on the ballot.

The write-in total is 1.28% of the total votes cast. See here. Thanks to Tony Roza for the link.

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.