11, 054 ballots were cast yesterday for a turnout of 20%, making Bryan Barash the winner in predicting turnout with his 19% guess.
Others with winning predictions were:
Jeffrey Pontiff, Steven Feinstein, Lisap, and Doug Haslam all correctly forecast the candidate with the most votes in a contested race: Margaret Albright (5,821)
Nobody predicted that Margaret Albright would also win most votes in any race. (Congratulations Margaret!)
Nor did anyone predict that Brooke Lipsitt would top the Charter Commission ballot with 4,369 votes.
Number of votes for number nine spot on Charter Commission (2,745): Only three brave souls ventured a guess on this challenging and analytical question. The winning guess goes to yours truly, Gail Spector, with a prediction of 2,061 votes.
I’m impressed. Way to go Brian, Gail, Jeffrey Steven Lisap, and Doug.
I was only able to predict the vote total because the entire election was a vast DEMPAC conspiracy.
Do folks prefer the term DEMPAC or PIG? Perhaps we should combine them into DEMPAC PIG.
Thanks Greg for not reminding everyone that I picked Wenhua to place between 4th and 7th! I mistakenly thought everyone shared my clarity.
@Fig, how about DEMPIG?
Jeffrey Wenhua was an excellent candidate. I don’t know about anyone else, but it was completely up in the air regarding which 9 would win. I will say that it took a fair amount of time to get to know the candidates, so I think a lot of folks took a “slate” of candidates into the voting booth with them.
I think DEMPIG works for me Groot.
That was the only thing I was close to getting right. My edge of the envelope guess on turnout was 20% or slightly less (lower than my prediction, which I think was 23 or 24%).
Do we have the actual percentage? I saw a raw number but wasn’t sure of the number of registered voters.
The number of registered voters for this election was 54,596.
That works out to 20.2% then – yup, I was over.
I saw an interesting idea on another (non-MA) blog. Someone wrote that his county doesn’t do off-year elections – they have all their elections in even years so that poor turn-out isn’t an issue for the local positions. Seems worth exploring for Newton.
I would support that, mgwa. Maybe the new Charter Commission can take a look at the idea?
BTW, knocking on doors also worked for Ben Weisbuch in 2005.
So more data:
Ward voter turnout:
Highest = Ward 2 with 1801 voters (26%)
Fewest = Ward 7 with 894 voters (15%)
Most popular Ward Alderman :
Lisle Baker with 63% of the votes cast (yet only 9.8% of all Ward 7 registered voters)
Least popular Brousal-Glaser with 44%. (9.2% of all Ward 3 registered voters)
If popularity of Ward Alderman is based upon the votes obtained against the total number of registered voters for the Ward, Emily Norton led the pack obtaining votes from 13.5% of all registered Ward 2 voters.
School Committee:
Beyond the success of returning members Albright and Siegel, the numbers reflect that uncontested School Committee Members all lost to blank voting. 🙂
Congrats to everyone. How very sweet for you Margaret. Many thanks to you
and Geoff Epstein – while he was school committee member, and even before-
for advocating for the children and parents of the Countryside school for years.
Single parent families who don’t having the luxury of the time or money to play politics, and the high percentage of children on subsidized meals at the school are lucky to have you in their corner. Unlike the wealthy landed gentry in Waban, there won’t be any new school over here, only an aging education trailer park and plenty of affordable housing. Good luck and get a football helmet, you and Steve are going to be the punching bags of the school committee during the redistricting process.