What I learned asking strangers to write a name on a ballot

My first yes came over lunch at Arena's in downtown Rehoboth.

I had not gone there to campaign. I had gone there to eat. But a small town has a way of folding your lives together, and across the room was a doctor who had been a client of mine. We started talking the way two people in health care always do, about the work first, and then, almost without noticing, about everything the work is tangled up in.

We talked about health care for a long time. She was worried about artificial intelligence, about how quickly it is moving into medicine and how slowly the rules are following it. She was worried about insurance, about regulations that decide what care is possible long before a patient ever reaches an exam room. And she told me something that stayed with me: her clinic had been approved for only a small supply of vaccines, far below what her patients needed.

I have spent my life at bedsides. I know what it means to stand in front of a need you have no power to meet. Listening to her, I heard the same frustration I have carried for years, the sense that the people closest to the problem are the furthest from the decisions. Somewhere in that conversation, she told me she would write my name in. She was my first yes.

It would be easy to tell that story as a victory. It was something quieter. It was proof that a write-in is not really a request for a vote. It is a request for trust, and trust is built in exactly the kind of conversation we had: unhurried, specific, about real things. Everything I learned afterward, I think, was a lesson in how hard that kind of conversation is to have at scale.

Lesson one: "Write-ins don't matter"

The objection I heard most was simple. Write-ins don't matter.

I understood why people said it. Most of us have never seen a write-in candidate win anything. The printed ballot feels like the whole menu, and the blank line at the bottom feels like a formality, a place for protest votes and cartoon characters.

So I would answer with Alaska. In 2010, Senator Lisa Murkowski lost her party's primary and ran for the United States Senate as a write-in. Voters had to write her name by hand, and enough of them did that she won. A sitting senator, returned to office by people who refused to accept that the printed names were their only choices. Write-ins have mattered before. They can matter again.

But the honest answer went deeper than one race, and that was where the real conversation usually started. I would talk about what I call the velvet rope.

Think of the line outside an exclusive club. There is a rope, and someone deciding who steps over it. Our politics works more and more like that. The candidates who reach the printed ballot, who get the debates and the coverage and the airtime, have very often already passed through a door that money holds open. In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, ruling that the government could not restrict independent political spending by corporations and other groups. That decision helped give rise to Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums as long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate. (Oyez case summary)

In my view, that is how Citizens United corrupted our politics. Not through one bribe or one scandal, but through a slow narrowing of the doorway. When people told me write-ins don't matter, what I heard underneath was something sadder: only the people behind the velvet rope matter. The write-in line is one of the few places on a ballot where that rope does not reach. It belongs entirely to the voter.

Lesson two: the barrier is invisibility

I spent a great deal of time teaching one fact: there are rules for write-ins, and a qualified write-in candidate counts just as much as a name printed on the ballot. The vote is just as real. The count is just as real.

What surprised me was how little that fact helped on its own. Nowadays so much of life is about appearance. We trust what we can see. A printed name looks official before anyone reads a word about the person behind it. A write-in candidate has no such advantage. You are not on the page. For many voters, if you are not on the page, you do not exist.

That, I came to believe, is the greatest barrier a write-in candidate faces. Not hostility. Not disagreement. Invisibility.

So I stopped thinking of my job as only persuading people and started thinking of it as teaching. I spent much of my time on social media and everywhere else I could, explaining how to vote for a write-in: where the line is, what it means to fill it in, why it counts. I pointed people to sources they could check without taking my word for anything, like Ballotpedia and the official Delaware Department of Elections website. I wanted voters to learn how to see through the appearance of the ballot to the rules underneath it.

I still believe that was the right work, whatever the result. A voter who understands the write-in line understands something true about their own power, and that understanding does not expire on Election Day.

Lesson three: the hardest ask

The hardest part was asking for donations.

I wanted it to happen naturally. I hoped that if the message was clear and the cause was honest, support would simply arrive, the way a good conversation finds its own way to agreement. That is not how it works. Asking for money takes deliberate, sustained effort, and it asks you to set aside a certain pride.

I will be honest that it was uncomfortable. But it was worth it, because the discomfort taught me something I could not have learned any other way. When you try to run without big money, you feel in your own body what the system demands of every candidate: the constant asking, the hours spent chasing dollars instead of listening to people. I came out of it more certain than ever that we need to get money out of politics and put everyday voices back in. Not as a slogan. As something I had lived.

What I would do differently

I would have started far earlier. The sooner the better.

I was inspired late. My campaign began as an effort to bring awareness, to spark interest, and to motivate people to get involved in politics, and by the time it took shape, the calendar was already short. With more time, there would have been more conversations like the one at Arena's, more people who learned how the write-in line works, and, I believe, much greater impact. If anyone reading this is thinking about a write-in run of their own, that is the first thing I would tell you. Start now. Invisibility takes time to overcome.

Where this leaves me

Like all movements, this one starts small, with a determined group of people.

I have made peace with small. Small is where every real change I have ever witnessed began, at one bedside, in one conversation, over one lunch. What matters is whether the people in that small group keep going.

We are determined to keep going: to keep educating Delawareans on their rights, and on the politics and policies that affect each and every one of us. That is a big part of why The Delaware Dispatch exists. It is not a campaign. It is a place to keep doing the teaching I started on the write-in line, explaining how things actually work, so that fewer people feel shut outside the rope.

And there is a greater mission beneath that one: to inspire and motivate our young people to carry this work forward, to continue the long effort toward radical equality and justice for all. They will inherit whatever doorway we leave them. I want it to be wider than the one we were given.

I would like to hear from you. Have you ever voted outside the printed ballot, or thought about it and decided not to? What made you choose? Write to me at travisjackstevens@gmail.com and tell me your experience. Those conversations are where all of this began.