MONROE COUNTY, N.Y. — Look at this list of names and things:
Mickey Mouse.
A head of cabbage.
Barack Obama.
Yogi Bear.

They all received votes for Monroe County district attorney this year.

There were 971 write-in votes for DA, a record-breaking protest vote over the fact that the race was uncontested.

“Here’s the list of write-in votes,” I said handing the 15 pages list to DWI attorney Ed Fiandach. “Take a look at some of those names.”
 
“A head of cabbage. A ham sandwich. A dead raccoon,” Fiandach said going through the list. “Oh my God. Andrew Cuomo!”

Fiandach got two write-in votes even though his name was misspelled once.

Brean: “The good news is you beat Darth Vader, Josh Allen and Atticus Fitch.”
Ed Fiandach: “Oh, that’s something to beat Atticus Fitch, that’s all right.”
Brean: “The bad news is you lost to ham sandwich.”
Fiandach: “Yeah.”
 
The list of almost a thousand names includes lawyers, doctors, food, former DA’s, former presidents, private people and protest slogans like “Free Palestine.”

Click here to scroll through the list of write-in votes for DA

“What this list does tell me is that it’s just the old axiom that no one should run unopposed,” Fiandach said.

The week before the election, I did my first story on the uncontested race for district attorney.
We showed that for the first time in at least 35 years, the Democratic Party did not have a candidate.
At that time, the chair of the party told me they couldn’t find one.

“To be clear, would we have liked a candidate? Yes,” said chair Stephen DeVay.

In the last three contested races for DA there were 48, 75 and 46 write-in votes.

This year? Nearly 1,000, and the county Board of Elections had to bring in more people to manually record them.

Brean: “Is it a little bit of a protest vote?”
Jackie Ortiz, (D) Election Commissioner: “I think it could be for some. I mean when you take a look at the write-in choices and in not just this race but many others, it’ll say ‘none of the above.'”

“People want choices and I think this was their way of saying – come on you got to do better than this,” Fiandach said.

The Democratic Party chair declined a follow up interview today.

Not only were there close to a thousand write-in votes, there were also 44,000 blank ballots. So, no vote for DA at all.

Republican Sandra Doorley won re-election with almost 95,000 votes.