LogFAQs > #888849340

Conner4REAL posted...

I voted for penn for president.

I think it was in 2008. Maybe 2012, forget. Wrote him on the ballot.

Just imagine if everyone else in the us forgot to vote, we would have had the penn & teller duo in the Oval Office.

That's actually not how write-in candidates work. You have to run as a Write-in Candidate in order for your name to count. The option is there for people to run for an office without having to pay the fees to get their name on the ballot. In local elections, a successful write-in campaign can give such a candidate a win, but in a Presidential election it's as irrelevant as it can get.

But yeah, you have to file paperwork with the appropriate offices and everything, just like if you were running as a candidate. The rules, as dictated by the Federal Gov't so I don't think this is State-dependent, is that the Write-in Candidacy Period begins a short time after the regular Candidacy Period has closed. You can only file as a Write-in Candidate during the Write-in Candidacy Period.

The 2008 election was an interesting one for Write-ins though, both valid and invalid. 242,000 votes were cast for Write-ins, more than both the Green Party and Constitution Party got for their candidates that were on the ballots of 2/3s of the states.

But! Only half, about 121,000 of those votes went to a Write-in Candidate. Alan Keyes got the most, at 48,000 but was only a Write-in for 4 of the 7 states he ran in. Nobody ran on purely as a Write-in Candidate. All of the Write-in Candidates were regular Candidates in at least one State.

Penn was not a Write-in Candidate in 2008 or 2012, but Bernie Sanders was a Write-in Candidate in 2016. Why? Because some States don't require that the candidate him- or herself be present to file for Presidential Write-in. Despite ol' Berns trying to get his supporters to swing in ol' Hills favor, some of them got him a Write-in Candidacy slot in 14 States. The votes cast for him are the most ever received by a Write-in Candidate for the office of President, at 112,000. Which was less than a single percent of the votes cast, so still super irrelevant. They weren't even in contested states where those 112,000 votes would have made the difference.

If anyone's fact-checking my numbers, just want to say I am rounding to the nearest thousand.