You said: "Don't be silly. Rules don't apply to democrats. You should know that by now."
What I do know is how elections are held - what must happen to bring that about. Many people think voting just happens on a few early voting days and election day and that's that. They don't realize the tremendous work that must happen months before an election so they can walk in and vote.
There are mechanics that must happen well before an election and that is why there is a deadline for filing for office. Once the sign up period is over, these mechanics in every state starts and no more candidates can sign up due to printing costly paper ballots for regular voting if voting machines are not used, and millions more paper ballots used for voting by mail which cannot, of course, be done on machines, and all provisional ballots are paper ballots, and the cost of preparing millions of voting machines.
You say rules don't apply to Democrats but the individual states would have to agree to junk the rules and reprint ballots and change machines and no red conservative state would agree to that for a freaking Democrat candidate.
My husband was a Republican County Chair and we had a Republican candidate running for county judge. He died during the campaign season but his name could not be taken off the ballot just as no name could be added. Even dead, this Republican man almost beat the live Democrat candidate.
Now, there is also a deadline for write in candidates and it is later than the deadline for party candidates. If Biden signed up to be a write in, on the voting machine his name would not be listed with the others on the ballot on the machine. There would be a place to punch to open a window for write in candidates. The names would be listed and the voter would have to type in the name of Biden.
A side note; You would be surprised how voters can screw up writing in the name of a candidate, especially if paper ballots are used, and how they can screw up just checking the names they want that are printed on paper ballots.
The night of an election, in Central Counting, in every county, there is a Resolution Committee. If a machine kicks out a paper ballot (remember, even machine voting counties have paper ballots for mail in ballots and provisional ballots). A counting machine will kick out a paper ballot if the choice of candidates can't be determined. Workers at a counting machine go through the paper ballots and they take out any ballot that is physically unable to go through the machine.
These ballots are delivered to the Resolution Committee to try to determine who the voter wanted as his/her choice. I was on numerous of those committees through a number of years.
Our rule for determining who the voter meant to vote for a write in candidate, was, did any part of the writing include any letters contained in any write in candidate's name, and were those letters in only one write in candidate's name so it had to be him/her the voter intended. If the voter wrote only the first name of the write in candidate, did that first name only apply to one write in candidate? If the last name was all that was written, was there only one write in with that last name? If the names were misspelled, that didn't matter as long as we knew what that name was. We also had the usual "Mickey Mouse", etc., as write in names but Mickey never won.
You would also be surprised how many paper ballots in general were mutilated and we had to fill out a new ballot for them that would go through the counting machine. Some had holes in them, some were torn, some had every candidate for an office marked out with an "X", or line drawn through them, and one of them hand written beside that group. Some had every candidate checked with a circle around one.
When we had to make a new ballot for a voter, one person of one political party would do the checking of the candidates as two people of the other party watched the checking being done. After that, as chairman of that committee, I had to sign my name on the back of the new ballot and write the number of the faulty ballot there, then sign my name on the faulty ballot along with the number of the new one, then paper clip them together and it was taken to the workers operating the counting machine.
Not many people know that each ballot actually is considered important and how much effort goes into protecting a voter's right to vote for his/her choice and get that vote counted.