COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: Write to vote a dual success in Amherst
Mickey Mouse and Ziggy Stardust have both been on the losing end of elections, sometimes the same one. Chuck Wagon has seen his support wax and wane over the years, as have Jim Nazium and Jacques Strap.
As pop culture icons or figments of the imagination, they never actively campaign. But thanks to the write-in ballot, they often appear as a humorous footnote in the final tally. Because that’s what a write-in vote-getter usually is: a joke.
But in Amherst last week, there was another word for two of them: winners.
Paul Steimle and Jennifer Bayles accomplished the rarest of electoral feats by winning seats on the Amherst School Board despite not appearing on the ballot. They finished third and fourth, respectively, and ahead of a candidate whose name did appear on the ballot.
Bayles has been out of town and could not be reached. But fellow write-in winner Steimle still seemed a little flabbergasted two days later.
“I was amazed,” Steimle said. “To actually get 841 people to write your name down is pretty good.”
It’s actually almost unheard-of for a write-in candidate to get that many votes. Ralph Mohr, Republican commissioner of the Erie County Board of Elections, had to reach back to 1987, when former Buffalo Bills player Jeff Nixon picked up more than 700 votes to win the Democratic line in the Hamburg town supervisor’s race.
“They’ve occurred in the past, but not to this magnitude,” Mohr said of the Amherst vote. “You had half of the people walking in casting votes that were write-ins.”
Steimle and Bayles both emerged as candidates when two incumbents chose not to run and the deadline passed for people to submit enough signatures on nominating petitions to appear on the ballot. That created a situation in which voters had four seats to fill and only three people to fill them.
“Had we known that those two people were not going to run early enough, I would have submitted my petitions and not had to go through that whole wonderful write-in process,” Steimle said.
And what a process it is! First, write-in candidates who are serious about winning have to let the voters know they are out there. Steimle spent about $500 on lawn signs and placed them in high-traffic areas, identifying himself as a write-in candidate. He appeared before PTAs and other groups and sent out mass e-mails.
Even with all that, for a write-in candidate to be successful, voters have to remember a name and know how to enter it. If you’ve never looked closely at a voting booth, you would have no idea that above the ballot are a series of tiny doors corresponding to each available office. Opening the door is the same as pulling a lever. Once the door is open, the voter must write the name on a roll of paper, which then advances. At the end of the day, an election inspector must look at the rolls of paper and count the number of times the candidates’ names appear.
When it’s one or two votes, it’s no big deal. When it’s hundreds, it’s a time-consuming process fraught with the potential for problems. But Mohr said the vote-counting “exceeded expectations,” and made winners of two write-in candidates.
Every fall, New York’s election laws are scrutinized and criticized, sometimes justifiably, as they seem designed to protect incumbents and keep challengers off the ballot.
What happened in Amherst last week proves that sometimes the people really do decide who gets to work for them.
There’s hope for you yet, Mickey.
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