Harry Potter, and Other Names Designed to Fool Voters
You don’t need an impressive name to go far in politics. The New York State Assembly currently has a member named Harvey Epstein, and the entire country once elected a president whose middle name is “Robinette.”
But when you walk into the voting booth and look down at a bunch of names, you might know nothing about some of those candidates but their names. So, maybe a politician figures a more winning name would invite success. This convinces them to switch their name to such alternatives as...
Harry Potter
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In March 2003, the second Harry Potter movie was in theaters and the fifth book was about to hit stores. In Russia, a 32-year-old man who had previously run unsuccessfully for provincial governor in Sverdlovsk now figured that changing his name to Harry Potter might give him the edge in politics he’d lacked so far.
Slightly complicating matters, Russian names never come in the form of simply “first name, last name.” There is also a middle name, a patronym derived from the person’s father. Vladimir Putin, for example, appears as “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” on the ballot each time he runs in one of Russia’s fair and open elections.
So, the newly named Harry Potter was forced to appear on the ballot as Harry Ivanovich Potter. This unintentionally made him sound like an evil alternate universe Harry Potter, and that was the last anyone heard of him.
Pro-Life
Other countries are a little more free when it comes to changing your name. When Idaho strawberry farmer Marvin Thomas Richardson wanted to change his name to something that would attract pro-life voters, he was able to change his name to “Pro-Life.” Not Marvin Pro-Life or Pro-Life Richardson but simply Pro-Life, period.
When he ran for governor in 2006, he did submit his name as “Marvin Pro-Life Richardson,” and the Secretary of State refused to put this name on the ballot. Two years later, Senator Larry Craig left office after getting caught soliciting sex in a men’s room, and Pro-Life ran for the vacant seat, now under the name Pro-Life. This time, his name went on the ballot intact, though it also included this note: “A person, formerly known as Marvin Richardson.”
He didn’t win that election. Nor did he win when he ran for governor again in 2010, Congress in 2012, governor yet again in 2014, the senate again in 2016 or Congress again in 2020. Usually, he gets around 2 percent of the vote. It seems that the people of Idaho aren’t single-issue voters. But then, neither is Pro-Life, who has a whole platform of bold ideas:
Philippe Égalité
Louis Philippe II was the Duke of Orléans and a prince du sang, or a prince of the blood. These titles all sound very impressive but were bound to be a liability because he was around during the French Revolution. Louis actually ed the Revolution, as he believed ’s monarchy should be eliminated and replaced with a constitutional monarchy like Britain has.
So, after he ed the general assembly and saw things began to get just as revolutionary as he wanted, he changed his name to Philippe Égalité. Égalité means equality and was to be one of the pillars of the revolution, along with liberty and fraternity.
In 1793, Égalité voted in the Assembly that anyone with “strong presumptions of complicity with the enemies of Liberty” was themselves an enemy and had to face consequences. The Assembly then presumed that Égalité was complicit with the enemies of liberty, due to his family ties. They found him guilty and guillotined his head off that same day.
Znoneofthe, Above
Clearly, a lot of politicians are unpopular no matter what, and in some elections, we hate every single candidate. The only reason to vote for any of them is to keep the worse candidate from winning, and if “none of the above” were an option, many of us would gladly pick it.
In 2016, Canadian man Sheldon Bergson decided to exploit this sentiment. He would change his name to “None of the Above.” However, he’d have to be smart about it. Since ballots list surnames before first names, separated by a comma, he’d have to call himself “Above Noneofthe” so the name would appear as “Noneofthe, Above.” Also, since names are sorted alphabetically, he’d have to make his name “Znoneofthe, Above” to ensure it appeared last.
He nabbed 135 votes in that election and 95 votes when he ran again in 2020. This wasn’t, of course, enough to win. He wasn’t even popular enough to be invited to the debates, and when he showed up uninvited, police dragged him out.
Shannon P. O’Malley
Nearly all these stories are about politicians who changed their names and won absolutely nothing as a result. We would like to dig up at least one case where the name change really did help. In 2010, a man named Phillip Spiwak ran for a judicial seat in Chicago and lost. He changed his name to Shannon P. O’Malley, and when he ran again in 2018, he won.
That got him onto the bench. But his years there raised questions about whether he really knew how to be a judge, as well as questions about whether he was cheating on his taxes. A special election last year gave voters the chance to choose to retain him or kick him out, and they went with option B.
When asked, O’Malley insisted that he’d never changed his name to fool anyone. He changed his name to honor his father, who’d been a mentor to him. Okay, said reporters, but was your father named Shannon then? Or named O’Malley? “That’s personal, you know,” he said, and he refused any further answer.
Low Tax
The most illustrious politician to go for one of these gimmicky name changes might be Byron Looper. In 1996, he changed his middle name to “(Low Tax)” and ran for the Office of Tax Accessor under the name “Byron (Low Tax) Looper.” He won.
In 1996, he ran for state senate. He received just 1,531 votes, while his opponent got 30,252. That might sound like quite a defeat, but it’s amazing that he managed to get even that many votes because he was at this point behind bars, having been arrested for murdering his opponent.
Looper was running against the current senator, Tommy Burks, and to take him out of the running, Looper went to the man’s farm and shot him in the head. He confessed the murder to a friend, and police quickly arrested him.
The deceased Burks’ name went off the ballot, just as Looper had hoped, and while many people suggested that being arrested for murdering the other candidate was grounds from removing Looper from the ballot as well, it seems this wasn’t the case, and he remained on it. He lost the election only because tens of thousands of people wrote in Burks’ widow as their candidate of choice.
Looper would go on to be convicted of the murder and would die in prison, and we’re not sure what motivated the thousand-or-so people who did vote for him in that election. Our guess is that a lot of them just hoped for lower taxes.
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