A write-in candidate is a candidate in an election whose name does not appear on the ballot, but for whom voters may vote nonetheless by writing in the person's name. Simply Voting always supported write-ins as a feature but election organizers would have to deal with voters specifying fictional characters or many permutations of the same name like this:
- John Doe
- John C. Doe
- J. Doe
- Doe, John
In many cases the voter is only supposed to write-in a fellow member of his organization. For that scenario we now offer "validated write-ins". When voters begin typing inside a validated write-in, an auto-complete feature lists all matching electors by name and forces the voter to select or type a valid name.
This makes writing-in much easier for the voter and also gives the election administrator much cleaner results to work with. Each write-in candidate will be valid and properly formatted.
