PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Jim Logajan on November 10, 2020, 07:23:38 PM
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"One presidential candidate received approximately 29 votes. He's surprised he got that many.
Zac Scalf is an Iraq War veteran, a Texas A&M grad, and the content production manager at Nine Line Apparel, a store in Savannah, Georgia. He is also, according to the ongoing tally at Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, running last in the presidential race, with a current total of 29 votes. That's 97 fewer than Keith McCormic of the Bull Moose Party and 112 fewer than Gary Swing of the Boiling Frog Party—though Swing might belong on a different list, since his website claims he was running for "president of Vermont."
Since Scalf wasn't on the ballot in Georgia, he didn't get a chance to cast a vote for himself. (He voted for Donald Trump instead.) But he wasn't really trying to win. The whole thing was a "social experiment," he tells me: It's easy to get on the ballot in Vermont—"and that's the way it should be"—so he flew up, got himself listed as an independent candidate, refrained from doing any campaigning at all, and waited to see what would happen. "On Election Day, I was sitting here at work and I thought it would be really funny if someone voted for me," he says. So his support exceeded his expectations. "Twenty-nine people went in that voting booth and checked my name and knew nothing about me."
[...]
While Scalf finished last among the officially recognized candidates, he still outpolled an assortment of figures who attracted write-in votes. I don't have the full national totals for these, but one state has helpfully listed all its presidential write-in votes online. It's the same state that gave Scalf a place on the ballot.
[...]
But I'm going to give the last-place crown to the man who made the effort to get on the ballot and then made literally no other efforts to get elected at all. Scalf thinks more states should make ballot access as easy as Vermont does: "You shouldn't have to be a billionaire to be part of the democratic process and be part of what makes America awesome," he says.
He adds: "People should take it more seriously.""
Full article: https://reason.com/2020/11/10/the-man-who-finished-last/ (https://reason.com/2020/11/10/the-man-who-finished-last/)