2006

I've been very impressed with the work done by the Orange County Board of Elections since its new director, Barry Garner, took over.

While I was managing Adam's campaign, they were always extremely fast in responding to information requests. Now they've taken what I believe to be the unprecedented step of tabulating and posting the write in totals for the Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor race, the full list of which you can see here.

Since no one really knows what the supervisors do and the races are nonpartisan, there are a lot of write in votes.

Some of the highlights:

Daffy Duck got a vote, but was far outpassed by Donald Duck who received four.

Jerry Garcia may have died over ten years ago, but at least a couple Deadheads think he would do a good job stewarding our natural resources.

This is as comprehensive an analysis as I could write for my 800 word column, but it's a start. I'm sure our many citizen pundits will have interesting perspectives to add.

As published in the Chapel Hill Herald on November 11th, 2006:

Despite being a ‘blue moon' election year with no major statewide races in North Carolina, Tuesday night's election has some interesting implications for Orange and Chatham Counties.

One lesson learned is that we have the most popular senator in the state. With 74 percent of the vote, Ellie Kinnaird received a higher percentage of votes than anyone else in a contested seat throughout North Carolina. While some people like to peg her as a liberal kook from Carrboro, the fact that she won all but one precinct in Orange County points to her wide appeal.

Here are some hastily assembled maps of the general election results based on unofficial data from the Orange County Board of Elections (November 7, 2006). The first maps below show the results of the county commissioner election. Individual candidate maps are available here. They include charts that show the five best and five worst precincts for each candidate.