| And this time democracy won. As a member of Montpelier's Board of Civil Authority I have to go out and work every election day, doing various tasks connected with counting ballots. One of our tasks is to record and count the write-ins, and there are often a lot. We don't count votes for obviously fictitious characters, like Mickey Mouse or Eric Cartman (an actual write-in this year), but we do count votes for everyone else. Sometimes it actually makes a difference, especially for the down-ticket offices, and on rare occasion an organized write-in campaign gets someone elected, but ordinarily the write-in is probably a protest vote or a friendly gesture to someone the voter likes and thinks might get a kick out of getting a vote or two. Counting the write-ins can be time-consuming because even in towns with machine counting the write-ins must be recorded and counted by hand. It would be a misstatement to say that the election officials are always happy to deal with them. A couple of weeks ago, in the context of some legislation pertaining to recounts, the House Gov Ops Committee got the idea to squelch the curse of write-ins once and for all. Here's the amendment they proposed: |
