The Write-In Stuff
Must all change always be for the worst?
I was an election junkie at an early age. I stayed up late into the night of November 5, 1968, pulling for that old windbag Hubert Humphrey. (I’m told that I cried upon waking to his defeat the next morning, though maybe I just didn’t want to go to school.) I began collecting campaign buttons and political ephemera in 1972—anyone wanna buy a bag of 100 “Nixon Now” pinbacks?—and however deep my adult anarchist streak runs I have always enjoyed the act of voting: walking to the polling place, joking with the election ladies, and pulling the lever for friends or no-hope longshots.
Ah, but those days are gone. The lever machines were junked as a result of the second President Bush’s tech-soiled Help America Vote Act, and the longshots were wiped out by the Aqualung-ish second Governor Cuomo’s election “reforms,” which made it nearly impossible for third parties and independents to achieve ballot access in New York State.
Must all change always be for the worst?
In classic “arsenic or cyanide, sir?” fashion, New Yorkers are given the Hobson’s choice between a Democratic Party that has lost any connection to rural and working-class Americans and a Republican Party that is running this year on the Iran War and building more data centers. Whoopee!
Ever Pollyanna, I tease out the silver lining in this assault on democracy by scribbling write-in votes, so on November 3, 2026, I’ll be doing just that. And y’know, it’s kinda fun.
In the governor’s race, Donald Trump’s non-support chased Rep. Elise Stefanik, who might have given incumbent Kathy Hochul a run for her donors’ money, out of the race, making way for the charisma-deficient Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. On one of Mr. Blakeman’s earliest forays Upstate he toured our lovely green and hilly Southern Tier, the northern tip of Appalachia. Dumbfounded by its lack of resemblance to Long Island, he remarked disapprovingly on what he saw as the life-worn people and shabby towns and rusted old pickups, speculating that if only the hicks would embrace fracking they’d be happy as clams, their prosperous asses perched on the seats of spanking new pickup trucks. Stay on Long Island, Bruce.
My fervent friend Howard is writing in Jesus Christ for governor this year. “Sister” Jeanette Chin, street lady and holy fool of Manhattan, was beloved by Catholic Workers for her favorite saying: “I vote for Jesus because Jesus votes for everybody.” I agree wholeheartedly with the good sister, so I’ll go halfway and write in the Catholic Worker founder and saint-in-waiting Dorothy Day for chief executive of New York.
“Our” congresswoman, the Republican Claudia Tenney, represents a hideously gerrymandered district into which the Democrats shoved as many of Upstate’s disproportionately Republican voters as could fit. How embarrassing is she? In 2025 La Tenney introduced legislation to make Donald Trump’s birthday a national holiday. There is probably no degrading act she would not perform for Forever War Don, up to and including calling the humble Great Lake thirty miles to our north “Lake America.”
How, O Lord, did we fall so far and so fast? For the House I’ll write in my late friend and our ten-term congressman Barber Conable, a brilliant and witty and entirely honorable (he refused any individual campaign contribution of greater than $50, even in the Watergate-flooded year of 1974) decentralist rural Republican of a sort who existed in a better country.
My pal Chuck, our retired county judge, a man of probity and intellect and humor, surely is superior in every respect to Attorney General Letitia James, whose lack of commitment to protecting the liberties of New Yorkers would make a Stasi apparatchik blush. He’ll still spend summers on the golf course, but Chuck would make a fine part-time AG.
Few state governments are as profligate as New York’s, so for comptroller I’ll pencil in my late friend Jim, the cheapest man in Batavia, a guy who would call my dad crowing in triumph if he found a dime in the racetrack parking lot.
The only vote I’ll cast for someone whose name actually appears on the ballot will be for our state assemblyman, Steve Hawley, ebulliently mischievous Republican tribune of rural New York. Picking up the mantle formerly lofted by William Randolph Hearst, Bella Abzug, and Norman Mailer, Steve has proposed the division of New York into two or more states, an idea so sane, so logical, and so much less bureaucratic and inhuman than the status quo that it appalls the power-lusters. (The first Governor Cuomo called the division of New York “divisive”—well, yeah, I guess it is….)
A lot of air has gone out of the balloon since 1968. I don’t cry over election results anymore. Maybe I should.
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