I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.
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Notes -
Eh. Oklahoma IIRC doesn't allow write-ins at all, and comes damned close to not allowing third-party candidates either -- last time I looked, the requirement was that they had to gather petitions with signatures of 3% of the voting population to get on the ballot. (I recall an old SSC open thread where someone from Romania was complaining about how strict the election laws were there, where it took signatures from 1% of the voting population to get a new party on the ballot. When even ex-Commie-Block countries have more liberal election laws than your state does, that says something.)
Personally, if I was in charge, I wouldn't allow write-ins either (having preprinted ballots that can be scanned by machine is a good thing), but I wouldn't have any requirement other than "the candidate meets whatever eligibility standards (min. age etc) are set for the office and pays a fee to cover the share of costs printing the ballots attributable to adding his entry."
I'm a big fan of hand-counting paper ballots, personally. Election counts are an absolute petri dish for conspiracy theories, so the more analog and impossible-to-even-theoretically-game the system is, the better.
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