Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Semi-Final Bexley Counts

Not surprisingly, the race to serve on Bexley's school board is not yet officially over. The final margin has Joan Fishel defeating Michele Kusma by 9 votes. The Franklin County Board of Elecions website is moving incredibly slow, so I'm not going to pull the report from last year's recount in the OH-20 race, but the point I was hoping to support was that several precincts had 1-2 vote shifts as a result of the recount. Assuming a similar rate this year, and that any discrepancies are random, it is possible though very, very unlikely that there could be a new result when the recount is finished next week.

I'll have more on the numbers tomorrow, as Matt Damschroder's shop there at the BOE continues to improve on the state's best data reporting with each election. For instance, in our city council race, each voter could vote for up to 4 candidates. The spread between 1st place and 5th place was less than 500 votes. The undervote, or the number of boxes left blank by voters, was greater than 5000. Just something to think about.

In other stuff that's been going on while I've been slacking, Joe Peffer over at Columbus Homes Blog says exactly what should be said about Bexley, local behind-the-scenes net-pro Paul Ackerman has decided to run for the statehouse in the 21st district, and the controversy over the Plain Dealer's blog experiment keeps sputtering on as they add a "blog roundup" to their own Openers blog.