Voters are desperately googling how to vote for a write-in candidate

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last updated 14 October 2016

In yet another sign that panic over the impending presidential election has reached an all-time high, people are frantically googling "write-in." CNN reported Thursday that, per Google Trends data, online searches for how to go about voting for a write-in candidate have jumped "more than 2,800 percent" in the last week, after Sunday's second presidential debate showed two candidates bitterly fighting an often personal war. The last time people were searching this much for how to write in a candidate was in 2004, when George W. Bush and John Kerry were running for president.

What makes the search surge even more interesting is where it's happening. The highest rates of "write-in" searches aren't in battleground states but in "Republican and Democratic strongholds," CNN reported; right now, the five states googling "write-in" the most are Vermont, Delaware, New Jersey, Utah, and Indiana.