Saturday, June 02, 2007

Gill Wins 51st in close count.

Gill won a close vote in the 51st. Delegates voting were much fewer than those registered, less than 2/3rds, but that was similar to the 50th district last year.

Both the unweighted and weighted votes were close. NotLarrySabato had the raw numbers up here. The totals:
Unweighted: Gill=304, Lucas=292
Weighted: Gill=210, Lucas 202
I put the numbers into a spreadsheet, and they checked out. Meanwhile, Citizen Tom reports about the convention here, here, and here. There was some controversy involving overvotes in some precincts (An overvote is when there are more votes cast in a precinct than there are voters for that precinct), and Tom gives us information about it spread across his posts, which partly relied on information from NLS's post that NLS subsequently deleted.

From what I read at Citizen Tom's blog, there was one overvote in each of 3 precincts. There was some discussion that they might have to throw out the entire vote from precincts with overvotes. If you threw out all three, Gill would still win. If you picked ONE to throw out, Lucas would win.

Rather than debate RPV rules (obviously they don't say to throw out ONE of three overvoted precincts), or discuss what was rumored to have been requested by the candidates, let's look at this from a "worst-case impact" perspective.

In this case, the "worst case impact" of three overvotes in the election is if the three overvotes were ALL cast for Gill, and if they were in the three precincts which had the largest weight-per-vote. In this case, the three precincts are KerryDale, Lynn, and Springwoods.

If you took one vote from Gill in each of the three, Gill would still win. The final would be:
Unweighted: Gill=301, Lucas=292
Weighted: Gill= 206.56 205.44
What this means is that the overvotes can't possible have ACTUALLY thrown the election from Lucas to Gill, and therefore suggesting they "effected the outcome" is incorrect.

Remembering that Gill had 51 delegates who were rejected because the RPV set an artificial deadline of May 21st for "applying for Registration", simply because we didn't have mass meetings (when if registration was open, they would have allowed registration up to the day of the election), and you can see that even with everything stacked against Gill, he won the election under any scenario.

It was a bit dissappointing to hear the delegate counts. Remember, the expectation was that there were 498 Lucas delegates, and 625 for Gill. That means that Lucas got about 58% of her delegates, and Gill about 48%. I attribute this to the campaign of hate-mongering and negative attacks run in the last two weeks, which probably turned people off entirely.

UPDATE: PWC Gop has the data in tabular form HERE.

UPDATE 6/3: Tom notes, and is correct, that his posts did not specifically say there was "one overvote" in each precinct, he was reporting a sense, and I should have made that clear. It was the best info I had at the time, I now see the total was 5. I expanded on this argument in a later post.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charles, I said there was about one over-vote in each precinct. Since the person I was talking to on the phone was busy, I did not get the exact number. The Potomac News, however, came out with a story this morning that reports the exact number of over-votes in each precinct. The paper says there were five over-votes altogether.

Five instead of three? When we are talking about almost 600 votes, the difference between three and five is not much to get excited about.
Anyway, so as to make that point, I did on post on the Potomac News story.

Charles said...

Tom, thanks. I'll update the post to reflect that. I knew you were just trying to provide information, and weren't trying to report an absolute number, but it was the best I could find before I got more info.

I'll read your post. I'd like to know how the paper knew the overvotes were "all in favor of Gill". That sounds like we could identify the overvotes by ballot.

Anonymous said...

I think they were just assuming they were all for Gill because he was in the lead, and the overvotes didin't make a difference because Gill still would have won.