Others/Write-Ins

[icemanj]

I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the election, and noticed how high the numbers for "others" are. Are these mostly Sanders write-ins? I suppose they could also be for the Constitution Party, but who else was there? Past elections these numbers aren't nearly as high. There is over 1 million votes for "Others", and it broke 1% in about half the states. Is this a new trend? If these weren't so high, would it change the outcome of the election? If all the "Others" votes in Wisconsin voted for Hillary instead, she would have won there. I'm not talking about other 3rd party votes that are listed, because obviously if no one voted third party at all, the results would be way different.

[MarkD]

I think write-in votes for Sanders, as officially recorded, was about 112,000. Darrell Castle, the Constitution Party nominee, had a little over 203,000 which was mostly votes  received when his name was on the ballot, and very little of that was write-ins.

In Colorado, they printed 22 names of presidential candidates on the ballot, and in Louisiana, they printed 13 names. Iowa printed 10 names, Minnesota and New Jersey both printed 9 names, and Arkansas, Idaho, and New Mexico each printed eight.

But I think most of those one million "others" were write-ins for a wide variety of candidates besides Sanders, Castle, or whomever else. Some states will tally all write-in votes, but did not report WHO received them; Washington has a law that says they will not report the number of write-in votes for any candidate when the total number of write-ins is so small that no write-in candidate could possibly win (which is to say all of the time). Other states will tally all write-in votes, and report that people like Captain America got 10 write-in votes, Darth Vader got 5 write-in votes, etc.