Special Elections

On Tuesday, City Council District is going to hold a special election for Gene Ricciardi's old seat. Personally, I feel that a "special election" is the kind of election that rides on the short bus and wears a helmet.

Coincidentally, you get the same types of people in both, all of whom you can see here in beautiful semimonochromatic colour.

Personally, as this is not my district, I'm not particularly... erm... particular about these candidates, so I'm not unleashing the full force, fury, might, and majesty of this blog, which, at this point, resembles a snarling chihuahua. Otherwise, Mike Waligorkski would have found himself at the business end of a sharply pointed witticism.

Anyway, the facts are these:

(1) Special elections are dumb; dumber than a box of dumb. People, generally, don't go out of their way to vote in these elections, and there's no really good reason why they couldn't be put off two more months until the May primary. 'Twould save us a whole heck of a lot of duplication of effort.

(2) Look at the map from the 2005 Primary. Here's a copy if you don't have one.


Those of you that remember back 10 months ago, will no doubt, also remember that 58,843 voted in this election... which was, at best, a perfunctory performance for the electorate.

Now, take a look at the District 3 area. As you can see, the only place that had "better than average (well... median, anyway)" turnout was in the South Side Flats. Oakland, the Southside Slopes, Knoxville, Arlington, Oakland, all had less than 144.817 voters per ward. So we're at roughly (very roughly) 6,300 voters in this district who will probably come out.

Now, assume that not all of them are going to show up, maybe 1/2, maybe 3/4?

Now, divide equally across 8 candidates, and you have somewhere between 393 and 787.5 votes/candidate, assuming an equal distribution.

Now votes are not normally distributed, with more probably going to the Democrat, well, just because.

Of course, Bruce Kraus got the endorsement from the PG.. or was that Bruce Krane? Or is Bruce Krane Batman?

I can't remember... anyway, my point is this:

This special election will be decided by a pretty close margin by nominally a handful of votes, in my estimation, and is largely dependent on which block of voters turns out and which block remembers to turn out.

And after that, we can vote for homecoming king and queen, like OHMYGAWD!