This assumes courts are utterly incapable of applying common sense.  Despite the impressive empirical evidence in support of that proposition, I am not prepared to endorse it.

By common law standards, a name only has to distinguish a person from others with whom one might be confused. In the Founding Era many did not always spell their own names consistently, and that irregularity continues to this day. By that standard a spelling that could not be confused with anyone alive could be counted. However, ballot counting is not a matter of common law, if only because it is not feasible for the election judges to research every variant spelling to determine whether there is someone else in the state for whom that spelling is used. Of course, such research only has to be done once for each variant spelling, and the range of possible spellings is a finite set if the number of characters is held, say, to nine, but that is still an excessively large number if no other constraints are imposed. (52,451,256 combinations of 26 letters taken 9 at a time with repetitions, or 5.4295037E12 possible strings.) However, unless one is going to judicially legislate a rule like "count if only two characters differ, otherwise not", then I would say the spellings of at least the last name need to be correct, and the first name can't be confused with any other Murkowski alive in the state.

-- Jon

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