It happens every election.
Thousands of mail-in ballots are delivered to the Travis County Clerk’s Office. The votes are counted and the results are slowly tallied.
Many votes are for legitimate candidates, while others are for Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse or “none of these motherf———.”
At the clerk’s office, every vote is taken seriously.
“It just doesn’t get dumped in a bin and we forget about it,” Travis County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado said. “A human — actually two humans — one from the Democratic Party, one from the Republican Party, will actually look at that image of your ballot and decipher what was the voter’s intent.”
If someone writes in “Mickey Mouse” and no real candidate is selected, it’s considered an “undervote,” which means no vote is cast for that race. But it’s not always so easy.
If a voter selects a real candidate and writes in a fictional candidate, a representative from both political parties have to agree on what the voter’s intent was.
Limon-Mercado said these kinds of ballots are the most frequent issue that comes up for the clerk’s office during elections, and they severely slow the process of counting early voting ballots.
Limon-Mercado said, during local elections, it takes around six hours to count ballots cast during early voting. But elections with state and national races take longer. In 2024, Travis County election workers spent three days counting early voting ballots for the presidential election because of the volume of write-ins, she said.
This year, the impact of write-ins like Mickey Mouse will be worse for election staff.
At the request of the Travis County Republican Party, early voting ballots will now be counted on Election Day instead of the Saturday between the end of early voting and Election Day. Limon-Mercado said she still hopes the first round of results will be released at about 7 p.m. on Tuesday, but the change could cause delays.
Travis County GOP Chair Jennifer Fleck said the party requested the change to prepare for a new state law — which will take effect in 2027 — that will eliminate the three-day gap between early voting and Election Day.
“Why not start now as a test run?” Fleck said. “The primary is definitely a lower turnout than the general election, so why not start this process now? Because it’s something we’re going to have to move toward anyway.”
Fleck said the new law — and the changes to when early votes are counted — will also ensure there’s no risk of “early exposure” of early voting election results.
Limon-Mercado said eliminating the gap early voting and Election Day might be useful for voters, but it will also create an “enormous amount of stress” on election staff.
But there’s one big thing voters can do to help.
“If that could be its own campaign, if people could just stop writing in, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, all kinds of other crazy stuff as like, their own personal protest,” she said. “They end up protesting us, and I don’t think they mean to protest us.”