How Many Californians Voted 'Ceasefire' on the Primary Ballot? It's Complicated

Ahead of last week’s March 5 California primary election, a national campaign called “Vote Ceasefire” urged voters to use their ballots to send a message on Gaza to President Joe Biden — whose support of Israel has caused division among left-leaning voters.

Unlike other states, California ballots do not offer an “uncommitted” option. Instead, the Vote Ceasefire campaign suggested that California primary voters write in the phrase “cease-fire” in the blank space below the presidential candidates on their ballot.

But post-election, measuring exactly how many voters in California actually did this has not proved simple.

A national movement in California’s primary?

Fresno resident Dennis Jeppson is one voter who said he used a write-in on their ballot to send a message on Gaza to Biden. “I’m very much a supporter of Biden,” Jeppson said. “I do think he’s done an excellent job. … It’s just Palestine is a very hard thing to overlook as a voter.”

Jeppson said he was motivated to write in “cease-fire” on his ballot by what he described as a constant stream of images and videos of “horrifying things” happening in Gaza on his social media feed — and he said he is not seeing the U.S. doing anything to try and stop the violence actively. “It’s been a very, I feel, blasé response,” he said.

Gaza has been bombarded by Israeli forces for five months now, with over 30,000 Palestinians killed, according to the most recent numbers from Gaza’s health ministry. The violence has prompted thousands in the Bay Area to march in support of a cease-fire, and a UC Berkeley poll earlier this year found that 55% of registered California voters do not approve of President Biden’s handling of the conflict.

Vote Ceasefire’s campaign in California was preceded by the “Listen to Michigan” campaign, in which progressives in that state called upon residents to vote “uncommitted” on their Democratic primary ballot to indicate their support of a cease-fire. Michigan — a battleground state home to a large Arab American and Muslim population — saw over 100,000 uncommitted votes.

Shortly after the Michigan primary, Vice President Kamala Harris showed support for a six-week temporary cease-fire. On Tuesday, several senators called upon Biden to stop providing weapons to Israel.

Alan Minsky, head of the national group Progressive Democrats of America, attributes those shifts to the Michigan result. “If there wasn’t a public outcry campaign, I don’t know when they ever would have moved,” he said.

Similar campaigns have emerged in other states like Minnesota, North Carolina, and Washington, each tailored to that state’s ballot. In California, Vote Ceasefire worked with local groups like Oakland Rising Action and Bay Resistance and suggested voters use a write-in option, as well as vote down the ballot for pro-cease-fire candidates. (Barbara Lee, for example, was a longtime congresswoman with a prominent anti-war record in California. However, she recently lost her bid for Senate.)

Santa Clara resident Syed Quadri handed out flyers about pro-cease-fire candidates on the weekend before the primary and told KQED he “want[ed] to make sure we use this opportunity to send a message that we need the platform of the Democratic Party in particular to change.”

“If you are not calling for an immediate and permanent cease-fire at this moment, then you are not a person of principle and of integrity,” he said.

In Fresno, Jeppson said he learned about the campaign from friends and advocates online. He said he knew the vote wouldn’t hurt Biden’s chances in a solidly Democratic state like California compared to more swing states like Michigan and North Carolina. “It’s really just hammering home that even in solid blue states, that there is a dissenting opinion on the issue of Palestine to the current policy that’s being undertaken,” he said.

The same UC Berkeley poll also found that 55% of California Democratic voters support a cease-fire.

Measuring the results of the protest will be difficult in California

A press release sent out by Vote Ceasefire the day before the California primary election stated that supporters of the campaign “argue that writing ‘ceasefire’ on the blank line below the names of presidential candidates listed on the ballot is an immediate, unmistakably clear message that will be counted and reported by state elections officials.”

But election officials told KQED that California does not track unqualified write-in votes, like writing in “cease-fire” on the presidential option.

Instead, “we would be reporting out on how many people did not vote for a specific candidate in our statement of the vote,” Sonoma County Registrar of Voters Deva Proto said — votes that are called “undervotes.”

The press office for the California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told KQED that “[c]ounties are not required to report undervotes nor are they required to report votes cast for non-qualified write-ins to our office.”

“Only votes cast for qualified candidates and measures are required to be reported and will be published in the Statement of the Vote or the Supplemental Statement of the Vote,” Weber’s press office wrote in an email.

Something that also complicates counting any potential protest vote in California is the fact that Democratic voters who are officially registered as “no party preference” (NPP) must request a cross-over ballot to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. And tallying up the number of NPP voters who requested a Democratic ballot — whether to vote for Biden, to purposefully not choose a Democratic primary candidate or to write in a message like “cease-fire” — is not automatic, said elections data expert Paul Mitchell, vice president at Political Data, Inc.

“In this election cycle, we got 129,000 people requesting a Democratic ballot, and that was only from some counties that gave [the data] to us,” Mitchell said. “The point is that we don’t — right now — have the data on even how many people had Democratic ballots. … So that lack of knowing what the denominator is means that we can’t really tell you what percentage of under vote we had.”

The Vote Ceasefire write-in campaign in California “probably won’t ever be quantified by anyone,” Mitchell said. “Because I don’t think anybody’s going to go through the trouble of going to all 58 counties and trying to identify exactly how many ballot requests they got for the Democratic ticket.”

Advocates are still pursuing options

Rachel Rybaczuk, Vote Ceasefire’s national coordinator, said she and her colleagues have still been trying to find a way to quantify the “cease-fire” write-in campaign. Specifically, Rybaczuk said they have reached out to the state by phone to request disaggregated numbers for the March 5 primary.

The state, however, subsequently told KQED that they were “not aware” of such a request. The department also said it was not yet aware of any large turnout of “write-ins.” (For context, it takes around a month to count California’s votes fully.)

Rybaczuk pointed to Los Angeles County’s vote count from the March 5 primary, noting that 21,168 write-ins appeared on those ballots — more than the number of votes cast in the county for Minnesota presidential candidate Dean Phillips, which stand at 15,892. A CalMatters analysis of the votes counted so far in Los Angeles County found that about 15% of Democrats didn’t vote for Biden.

Rybaczuk said the write-in category has been used for jokes in the past but should be taken seriously by election officials.

“People have used it to write things like ‘Mickey Mouse,’” she said. “[But] this is a clear, unequivocal position. People are communicating to the administration that they are using their vote to demand a permanent, meaningful cease-fire for everybody involved.”

California could also have a more effective voting system for presidential primaries, Political Data, Inc.’s Paul Mitchell said, by having the parties on the same ticket.

“The reality is that voters would be much better off if we had the same system,” he said, “rather than this goofy thing where independents who want to vote for the Republican primary have to re-register, go through those hoops, and independents who are leaning Democratic, have to request a ballot.”

“It’s a paperwork mess,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t really empower voters, and it doesn’t help turnout.”

KQED’s Annelise Finney contributed to this story.