I suppose people do it because they’ve heard of other people doing it, and it seems funny. Or they don’t actually know the printed candidates well enough to pick one, or they don’t actually like the printed candidates well enough to pick one, and it seems funny.
Or maybe it’s a form of angry refusal to endorse the major parties. I can’t speak for other countries, but you know that most Americans live in one-party districts and maybe two-party states, right? To many of us, elections are a joke already.
As was mentioned, that’s not nearly as fun though. If the benefits of increasing how efficiently the votes could be counted outweighed the somewhat intangible benefit of being able to put whatever you want in there, then I imagine you would probably hear some calls for that to be done. Has that been the case at all?
I actually did this for my county’s Board of Education because of the three candidates running one was an “old-school” Republican who nonetheless supported charter schools, an even more enthusiastic charter school shill who also was arrested for charges of domestic violence, and a Michele Bachmann clone who vows to prevent the mandatory vaccination of children in schools. Accordingly I voted for Mio Akiyama.