On the ground

The following opinion column was written by Ron Bailey, DCDC member from the Town of Meredith, and was published in the Walton Reporter on November 18, 2009.

I had always thought of write-in voting as a form of dissent or protest. You don’t like the candidates on the ballot so you scrawl in the name of some radical who doesn’t have a chance–or ridiculous such as Mickey Mouse.

I did this once in the 1968 Presidential election when I didn’t trust Richard Nixon (with good reason, as it turned out) and couldn’t stomach the Democrats’ selection of Hubert Humphrey, an honorable man who had the misfortune to be Vice President during the escalation of the Vietnam War. I wrote in the name of Dick Gregory, the radical black comedian who opposed the war.

Recently I did a bit of on-line research and was surprised to learn that write-in campaigns have proved successful in a wide range of elections. At least four candidates have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as write-ins, and that old segregationist J. Strom Thurmond rode into the U.S. Senate in 1954 on a write-in campaign.

Perhaps the most remarkable such campaign was waged by the Socialist Eugene V. Debs in 1920. Though in prison for violation of the Espionage Act–he had made a speech against World War I three years previously–Debs received nearly one million write-ins for President out of some 26 million votes cast.

This little side trip into history is occasioned by the long-awaited debut of the new voting machines in this month’s county and town elections.

“Voting” machine is actually a misnomer. The machine is essentially a fancy tabulator. Except for a handful of handicapped voters who made their choices on the machine’s ballot-marking device, practically all of us voted on old-fashioned paper ballots that were coded in such a manner that they could be scanned and counted by the machine.

To be sure, there were complaints aplenty. Voters in Meredith grumbled about how much they missed the familiar old lever machines. Our little Town Hall in Meredith was overcrowded because the cost of the new machines had forced the consolidation of polling places: our town now had one polling place instead of two.

But contrary to the earlier concerns of county election officials, who worried that these expensive machines could not even count, the new system worked surprisingly well. The costly machines could actually add. Hand counts of all the paper ballots by county election officials showed, in town after town, that the totals on the cash-register-like tapes spat out by the machines at the end of the day had been amazingly accurate.

A notable characteristic of the new paper ballot is the ease with which the voter can do a write-in. The party rows—Republican, Democrat, etc.–are at the top of the ballot as usual. The write-in row stands alone at the bottom, and fairly leaps out at the voter. It offers ample space for writing in a name for each office. By contrast, performing a write-in on the old lever machines was difficult, requiring the voter to lift up a little door and write in a cramped, tightly confined space.

Not surprisingly, hundreds of write-in votes were cast in the recent 19 town elections. A few, predictably, favored cartoon characters such as Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck or the shock-jock broadcaster Howard Stern. Someone scrawled in each category across the bottom, “Anyone else.” Another voter opted for nobody else–“Nada.” In the towns of Franklin, Hancock and Meredith, however, there were more than 100 write-ins cast for a single legitimate candidate.

In Franklin, where the Republican incumbent Connie Young was the only Town Clerk candidate on the ballot, a write-in challenge developed. Some residents were angry at Young’s rejection of petitions aimed at getting on the ballot a proposition to allow beer and wine to be served in village restaurants, and they mounted a write-in campaign. The campaign was openly conducted and well publicized but lost by more than 4 to 1.

In Meredith, on the other hand, the Republicans did not reveal the name of their write-in candidate for Supervisor until the last minute. The weekend before the election, they made telephone calls urging voters to write in the name of James Small.

As Town Democratic chairman, I was surprised by this by this sudden entry by the Republicans into what had been an uncontested election. For months I had wondered why the Republicans, who enjoy an historic edge in voter enrollment in Meredith, had not put a candidate for Supervisor on the ballot. Now I was shocked to hear that they were resorting to the write-in route.

I had never heard of Small, but soon found out he is a registered Conservative who works for County Sheriff Tom Mills. (Mills happens to be a Republican committeeman in Meredith.) Several friends described Small as “a nice man,” but nobody knew where he stood on possible issues in our town such as big wind turbines and drilling for natural gas. Nobody knew what administrative or legislative experience he had, where he stood on open government or what he had done in the way of public service.

As we do every two years, Democrats had mailed a brochure to all registered voters in Meredith describing our candidates and their concerns. It included a letter from our incumbent Supervisor Keitha Capouya setting forth her views and her record during two years in the job.

Anyone wanting to hear more from Capouya could telephone her, e-mail her or see her in person during office hours at Town Hall. But the last-minute write-in campaign of her opponent’s candidacy came too late to allow the opportunity for town residents to question him.

As it turned out, Capouya won comfortably. Her victory margin of two to one was similar to the one she enjoyed two years ago in a hotly contested election against an openly declared Republican candidate whose name was on the ballot.

I was pleased at the result, of course, but a bit concerned. After all, with a three-day stealth campaign that had short-circuited the usual five-month political process, her opponent had received one third of the votes. As someone involved in the local political process for more than three decades, I began to wonder:

Why go through that whole bothersome business of endorsing candidates, circulating petitions, publicizing their positions and having them answer to the potential voters?

Maybe I’ve been wasting my time.