Counting Thads

Election clerks in western Oakland and Wayne counties could be up late on the night of the Aug. 7 primary counting Thads.

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter announced today in a Detroit News column that he will mount a write-in campaign in the 11th Congressional District Republican primary after his re-election campaign failed to gather the minimum 1,000 valid signatures needed to get on the ballot.

That raised an obvious question:

Are McCotter voters going to have to spell the congressman’s first name correctly (T-H-A-D-D-E-U-S)?

Apparently not.

“‘Thad’ works,” McCotter tweeted today.

Per state law, any variation of a person’s name can count as a write-in vote, according to Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office.

“Our procedure is to tell clerks to count votes for write-in candidates if the voter’s intention is clear,” Johnson spokesman Fred Woodhams wrote in an email to The News. “The candidate’s full legal name is not necessary so ‘Thad McCotter’ is acceptable as are similar versions as long as the intention of the voter is not in doubt.”