The 2024 presidential primary might have been a low-key affair in many ways but that didn’t deter voters.

More people cast votes in Tuesday’s Republican contest than in any previous presidential primary of either party in New Hampshire’s history.

As of the latest vote tally on Wednesday afternoon, nearly 318,000 Granite State Republicans and independents cast votes in the GOP primary, exceeding the previous record set in the 2020 Democratic primary, where more than 298,000 Democrats and independents faced a crowded field including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Donald Trump holds the distinction of receiving the most votes ever in a New Hampshire presidential primary, with about 173,000 votes as of Wednesday morning. Sanders held the previous record with about 152,000 votes received in 2016.

The 2016 primaries, the last time neither party had an incumbent president running for reelection, had the highest combined turnout in the state’s history with about 539,000 people voting. Tuesday’s primary currently ranks fourth in combined turnout.

Write-ins galore

Although this isn’t the first time a sitting president has skipped the primary and gotten all his votes via write-ins – Lyndon Johnson did it in 1968 with unhappy (for him) results – Tuesday’s push to write in President Joe Biden produced what is probably an unprecedented result.

Votes were still being tallied Wednesday but Biden received above 62,000 write-ins, more than half the total of Democratic votes and almost three times the tally for Dean Phillips, whose name was on the ballot. That is the most write-in votes ever received by a primary candidate and is probably the biggest percentage of votes ever won by a write-in campaign.

In many parts of the Capital region, Biden did even better: In Concord, his write-ins made up 72% of Democratic votes, in Bow they were 75% and in New London they were an eye-popping 87%.

For the two main candidates with names on the ballot, Phillips defeated Marianne Williamson by a margin of about 5-1.

Lots of ways to write them

Write-ins are the bane of existence for poll workers because they have to be tallied by hand. Perhaps someday an AI-powered voting machine will be able to make sense of people’s writing, but that day is not today.

The Secretary of State’s Office gives election moderators some leeway in judging the validity of write-ins, the important point being whether you can determine the voter’s intention.

“It’s up to the moderators when the polls close and we were looking at those ballots to assign write-in votes to a candidate and the standard that they use when they’re doing that is: What was the voter’s intent? Is it more likely than not that that was a vote for that particular candidate? And so we did extensive training with moderators on what might constitute a good vote,” Secretary of State David Scanlan said Wednesday in his office, where tallies from around the state were still coming in.

The tally from Sutton shows what sort of leeway is needed. It lists no fewer than 14 different ways that voters write in Biden, from “Joe Biden” (the most common, at 141 times) to “Joseph Biden” (18 times) to a host of one-time variations including “President Joe Biden” and “Joe Biden President” and “PrezBiden” and one efficiency-minded voter who reduced it to the absolute minimum: just “Biden.”

Ceasefire misfired

The most unusual write-in effort this year was from a group called Ceasefire.org, which said that Democratic voters should write in “cease fire” on the Democratic ballot. The group thought this would send a message to President Biden and other elected officials about pushing for a cease fire in the war in Gaza.

Voters did not agree.

While there isn’t yet an official statewide tally for the effort, no local polling place recorded more than a handful of “cease fire” write-ins. The number was so small, in fact, that they were often outdone by the number of people who write in cross-party names, putting “Donald Trump” on the Democratic ballot or “Joe Biden” on the Republican.