Charles Darwin Gets 4,000 Write-In Votes In Georgia
From the archive: published Nov 9, 2012, 13 years ago. Details may have changed since.
Charles Darwin received almost 4,000 write-in votes for the 10th Congressional District seat in Georgia’s Athens-Clarke County Tuesday. The seat was retained by five-year incumbent Rep. Paul Broun.
Some counties won’t be tallying the votes for Darwin since he was not a properly certified write-in candidate and has been dead for over 100 years.
A campaign to write-in Darwin’s name on the ballot began after Broun called evolution and other areas of science “lies straight from the pit of hell” at a sportsmen’s banquet at a church.
Jim Leebens-Mack, a plant biologist from the University of Georgia, created a “Darwin for Congress” Facebook page following Broun’s comments. He said the number of votes were “in the ballpark, a little bit more” than he expected. The page has received over 1,600 likes.
Leebens-Mack went on to say that the number of votes for Darwin make it clear to him and he hoped everybody “that Paul Broun is vulnerable” in terms of being reelected to Congress. Broun was elected in a special 2007 election, and reelected in 2008, 2010, and 2012. His 2012 win was in a newly drawn 10th district that had been reconfigured as part of congressional reapportionment.
Leebens-Mack said, “The campaign for 2014 started yesterday [Wednesday.]” He added that the next step will be to identify potential write-in candidates for the next congressional election.
Other write-in votes in the race included “Anyone but Broun,” “Anyone else,” “Big Bird,” and “Bill Nye, the Science Guy.” The only legitimate write-in was Brian Russell Brown of Augusta. Brown received more than 200 votes in Athens, and has been written-in for other high-level offices in recent years.
Broun received 209,917 across the 10th district, and 16,980 in Athens-Clarke County.