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Kevin Brown’s filing as a write-in candidate for superintendent of public instruction has prompted some speculation regarding how he might affect the race between Republican nominee Tony Bennett and the Democratic candidate, Richard Wood.
He won’t.
And it has nothing to do with last week’s revelation, first reported on Indiana’s News Center, that Brown, a Fort Wayne Community Schools board member, has a conviction for driving while under the influence in 2001.
Write-ins simply are not a factor in Indiana, where the two major parties dominate politics. Minor party candidates, notably Libertarians, have very little influence on races, and their names are on the ballots. As a write-in candidate whose name will not even appear on the ballot, barring some sort of major scandal involving both of the major party candidates or an unexpected well-financed campaign, Brown will receive no more than a handful of votes Nov. 4.
Even counting write-in votes has a relatively short history. Indiana ignored write-ins until a 1990 federal court decision ordered the state to count all the write-in votes, and count them they did – including votes for Donald Duck, Andy Griffith, etc. “The 1990 election is an election that will live in infamy” for election officials, said Andy Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and the Democratic appointee to the Allen County Election Board.
So the legislature brought some order with a law mandating that election officials only count the votes of write-in candidates who pre-register at least 30 days before the election.
The U.S. Supreme Court has since ruled that states are not compelled to count write-ins, but the state law remains.
Though their votes are counted, write-ins face almost insurmountable odds, running not only against the major party candidates but requiring voters to take a lot of initiative and go through the trouble of writing in a vote, which is far more difficult than pushing a button.
Look at the 2002 Fort Wayne Community Schools board race. Kweku Akan, then known as Carl Johnson, was the incumbent but registered as a write-in after missing the deadline to file for the office. The lone candidate who did file, Marzine Moore, not only lacked name recognition but announced before the election that he would not accept the board seat because he was a teacher in the district and would not give up the teaching post.
Even with those odds favoring him, Johnson still won only about 25 percent of the vote as a write-in, losing 1,547 to 535.
Brown, who is on his first year on the school board, hopes to capture more votes than the two major party candidates, both of whom have experience as school superintendents, the backing of the parties and willserve if elected. For voters who don’t want a Republican or a Democrat, they have an option in Libertarian Sam Goldstein. All of their names will be on the ballots. Brown’s won’t.
In 2002, more than 2.3 million votes were cast for superintendent of public instruction. If Brown gets more than 230 votes, I would be surprised.
