Photos of ballot tapes at polling places.
With unopposed City Council seats on the Tuesday ballot, I am interested to see who or what people may have written in place of the one candidate that they didn't see the reason to vote for. Several years ago, I documented this same process by taking photos of the poll tapes that are posted after every election but this year a friend provided an official DeKalb County printout of every write in entry that fully documents what people entered. I am amazed that people even wrote in on contested races whereby they wasted the reason they were there, or maybe those voters only wanted to vote on the DeKalb County ethics referendum?
Anyway enjoy the list for what it is worth as a number of people took the time to do the unconventional thing to either vote for themselves, their spouse, someone else they admire or someone they want to laugh at (with).
2 comments:
I was waiting for this. Thanks!
Please Councilman John Heneghan, you disappoint me! With someone as enthusiastic and in love with the democratic process as you are, how can you possibly use your bully-pulpit blog to denigrate write-in votes, even in hotly contested races?
Write-in votes have played a very important historical context in the United States, some candidates, in fact, have even won via write-ins: South Carolina's Strom Thurmond was the first US Congressman to win a seat through write-ins and as late as 2006, Congressman Charlie Wilson ran a successful write-in campaign, and on multiple occasions candidates have won presidential primaries, with the likes of political luminaries such as FDR, Ike, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy being among them.
But mostly write-in votes in America have been a means of not-so subtle protest. Do you recall recent Georgia political history where Georgia Congressman Paul Broun stated that evolution was a lie straight from the pit of hell? Well, folks in his district wanted to show the rest of the nation that they weren't as asinine as their US Representative, who was running unopposed, so they cast over 4000 write-in votes for Charles Darwin against him.
Stella Adler once said, "A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong", well perhaps though they know that their candidate won't win, the write-in voter casts their vote to tell society that something is wrong with the political system." Could that be why so many in your district thought Pablo Escobar was the better man for your job?
Hmm, good counselor, the lady doth protest too much, methinks, I do believe that you ridicule the write-in voter because you have nightmarish visions of a successfully mounted write-in campaign where you are defeated by the buffoonish "Gary Ray Betz", or your eternal nemesis - "Anybody But John Heneghan". So, respect the electorate, sir, respect the electorate, no matter for whom or how they choose to cast their ballot, they are of the very few citizens that are exercising the right that brave men and women died to protect.
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