Wine: meeting voters, explaining process key in Dundy Co. victory

    Write-in candidates being successful at the national level elections are almost unheard of, with two U.S. Senate races being won in that effort by Strom Thurmond, South Carolina, in 1954, and Lisa Murkowski, Alaska, in 2010 being the only exceptions.
    Local level elections see a more prolific presence of write-ins and their successes.
    In Dundy County’s General Election earlier this month, the seats for County Attorney and Sheriff were both sought out by write-ins against candidates on the ballot. In the days before the election, speculation of the two write-in candidates’ chances were often overheard in street conversations.
     Arlan Wine won the Dundy County Attorney seat with a comfortable edge of 385 votes over 296 for incumbent Gary Burke. Wine has been the Chase County Attorney since 2002, but in May, in the Republican primary, to Wine’s surprise, he lost to challenger Joel Burke with the vote count of 508 to 407.
    The votes generated for the Dundy County Sheriff write-in candidate fell short for an upset, however.
    Wine had initially considered leaving public office and maintaining his private practice but later determined he had a chance of winning the Dundy County position as a write-in since the incumbent, Gary Burke, was running unopposed. Wine met the residency criteria of living in Dundy or an adjacent county.
    “I didn’t know how the election might turn out with the write-in, but I had a campaign strategy and believed if it was God’s will, it would come to be,” he said.
    Being an unknown in Dundy County, Wine knew this to be a handicap but one that could be overcome with effort, he said.
    He canvassed the Dundy County area with large and small road signs, did numerous meet and greets in restaurants and the Benkelman senior center and made the best use of personal contact and hand shakes with as many people as possible.
    Getting in front of the people and educating the voter about him as attorney, the road signs and the three-fold handouts were a positive saturation to getting the public to learn about him, he said.
    The biggest help, Wine believes, was giving people the handouts and explaining the importance of writing in “Arlan Wine,” and checking the box on the ballot.
    In write-in voting, sometimes the name is misspelled, and depending on the locale, that will invalidate the vote. But more often the name is written in correctly, but then the box isn’t checked, or filled in, so that vote doesn’t count.
    Most voters have never experienced a write-in campaign, so getting them familiar with the candidate and the importance of the two- step process may be what swung the vote in the Dundy County Attorney race, Wine said.