Election Results 2009!

While the cat's away, the mice will play!

We'll be here when you get back ... or maybe we'll e out drinking beer!

Way too much magenta and red in this graphic, and while residents of the orange areas perhaps should feel prouder compared to their neighbors, it's not much to crow about in a participatory democracy.http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/NC/Orange/11018/18301/en/vt.html Overall, with 31 of 33 precincts reporting, voter turnout is 15.37%. 

For running a positive campaign and staying above the fray and winning the right way with VOE to boot?Either way, I am doing it.Congratulations Penny!!!

We should all be proud to live in a community where so many qualified individuals are willing to give of their time and intelligence to run for public office. Congratulations to all the winners; and thank you to all the candidates.

Including Durham:http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/NC/10950/18773/en/summary.html TOWN OF CHAPEL HILL MAYOR (Vote For 1)2 of 2 Counties Reporting  PercentVotesAugustus Cho2.65%226 Matt Czajkowski47.46%4,053 Mark Kleinschmidt48.62%4,152 Kevin Wolff1.14%97 Write-In0.13%11   8,539 includes all precincts in both counties, but not including any provisional ballots which will be counted in a week. Provisionals tend to be Democratic voters, there are election day transfers, out of precint votes, etc

Interesting to click on "contest detail maps" for each of the elections - and notably the Council race.  It seems Gene Pease is going to beat Jim Merritt and Matt Pohlman there - assuming unofficial tabulation percentages hold through certification - and you can see where their respective strengths lay.  Over all, hard to resist arriving at some generalizations about demographics in many of the races based on those maps, although I do acknowledge that some other variables (e.g., "home" neighborhoods of candidates and density of population) come into play.  The most fun is to speculate in Carrboro about what a "tie" means for certain precincts, based on those maps.

WRAL says election is too close to call and says the winner must get full 50% to avoid a run-off.  As of now, NC Bd. of Elections website has Kleinschmidt at either 48.62% or 49.49%.  Don't know which sets of votes will be counted between now and official certification, but some interesting scenarios re: runoff - Wolff and Cho votes almost certainly would go to Czakowski, and at the moment, that would imply a lead of about 70 votes assuming exactly the same voters and votes - which wouldn't happen, but just saying . . .

I vaguely recall the threshold to be 40%.

All the back & forth, the "down & dirty" but legal Cam Hill mailer (complete with accurate statements), the "but Matt Cz is really a progressive visionary" apologia, the go-for-broke borderline move by Aaron Nelson to use the Chamber's list to endorse the developer's slate (who can blame him for taking the chance - it looked like the best chance in years), the satisfying slate of winners in the Town Council race that revealed that Chapel Hill has not yet morphed into Cary, & Carrboro quietly electing another great group of reps... I'm proud to live here. We survived a close election with the wherewithal to continue our leadership in these times of fiscal-environmental-fairnesss challenges.

It is wonderful that so many good people would toss their hats into the ring.  I thank and respect them all.     In the CH  council race, four of the last six top votegetters have been novices when they won the most votes:  Penny Rich, Laurin Easthom, Sally Greene, Jim Ward.  I'm not sure exactly what that means, however.I'm particularly happy that this has been an election where money did not talk very loudly.  The two VOE candidates won mayor and 1st place for council, while the biggest spender (by far) failed closely.  It will be interesting to see the cost figures when all the campaign reports are filed.No one is happy with the turnout, however we don't know what the turnout is with any great accuracy, since our voter roles are bloated due to the transient nature of CH.  Do anyone have any information on what fraction of currently-registered voters still live here?

My experience poll tending & volunteer coordinating had me interacting will several volunteers from our campaign and from several campaigns in several different races, and it was such a wonderful experience. I talked to some Matt supporters who were poll tending where I was, a husband an wife team who also went to NCSU like I do now, the husband was in fact in the same public administration program once upon a time as I am in now.  I talked to Shell supporters with whom we found plenty of common ground.  I talked to Mr. Deharts dad who was at Coker Hills while I was and we talked about Mt. Airy where I grew up, and specifically our common high school of North Surry High.And when we were all wrapping up shifts there around the end of the lunch rush, we talked about how great it was meeting each other, learning about where people work, who their families are, where their kids go to school, and how many connections we all have, and that in the end no matter who won all the candidates running to be public servants would be doing a noble thing and that we'd all still be one town of neigbhors working together tomorrow.In some more national elections I've seen poll tenders get nasty with each other... And I just have to say I am very proud of the truly Chapel Hill experience I had today which left me feeling good about the whole process before I knew any of the results...even if it happened while running off of about 4 hours of sleep. I also have to give a shout out to all of our volunteers.  As the volunteer coordinator I got to meet so many of them, and with an election this close you know that it couldn't have been pulled off without each and every one of them, they were amazing.  Now I'm off to bed.  I've been supporting Marks campaign since May, and I need at least one good nights sleep before diving back into grad school tomorrow.

Maybe it was your dirty little flyer. Was that the deal? You do the sneak attack flyer, Kevin & Mark give you the seat you could not win yourself? It almost worked. I am sure Mark will find something for you to do. 

Cam's postcard?  Sneak attack flyer?Somebody's a little grumpy this morning.

First I'd like to congratulate all of the candidates, all of the winners. Bravo!Second, I'd like make an observation about process. I see a couple of posts regarding the flyer, pointing out that the important thing was that it was completely "legal" and at the same time characterizing Aaron Nelson's endorsement as "over the line." For me, here is what it gets down to: transparency and integrity. You can argue until the cows come home about Aaron's email, but at least he told his board what he was going to do and he signed his name. Integrity is when your actions match your words. I actually don't want to argue about whether Cam's mailer was "legal" or not. For someone who bemoans the use of aliases on OP, he sent out a negative flyer to CH residents anonymously. It lacked honor and it certainly lacked transparency. For those who believe that the end justifies the means, this will seem like quibbling. This is why I started posting to OP in the first place: the manner of the Strom resignation appeared to me to play fast and loose with the rules and with the values that I believe define Chapel Hill. Strangely enough, I am optimistic about Chapel Hill's future because the man who was elected to be mayor Mark, is not defined by the actions of some of his supporters. He does his best to act honorably (as does Matt). I believe he will see the obvious, that it was a very close election, that there is an unprecedented and significant (very nearly half) portion of the electorate who feels unheard by town officials. I hope the way forward will be to include everyone in the conversation and decision making process. I have confidence that Mark will do his best. I believe he will act with integrity and honor.

There was an early election thread that speculated on how many candidates would get a "majority" of all the votes cast. If we assume that everyone that voted cast a vote for Mayor, that means 8,539 votes were cast. Due to the distribution of votes and the fact that not all voters cast their full four votes, only Penny Rich had support of a majority of all the voters:Jon Dehart        3054   35.77%Laurin Easthom 4035    47.25%Ed Harrison        4081    47.79%Jim Merritt      3333       39.03%Gene Pease      3794     44.43%Matt Pohlman   3593    42.08%Will Raymond     1509   17.67%Penny Rich       4278   50.10%Write-In            108       1.26%While 8,539 voters cast ballots, allowing a total of 34,156 potential votes, only 27,785 votes were cast, an average of 3.25 votes per voter. This may have reflected a lot of triple shots for the Pease/Pohlman/DeHart slate or other targeted voting. Interestingly, if Chapel Hill had used the majority/runoff system that Raleigh and Cary employ, while there would have been a potential runoff for Mayor, there would not have been one for council.  That's because in calculating a multi-seat race majority, omitted votes are NOT counted, the majority is calculated from the 27,785, not the 34,516, and under that system, five candidates had a majority, the four winners plus Pohlman. If more than four have a majority under the runoff system, only the top four win.

When you take the registered voters in the CH precincts, take out the non-CH voters in Patterson and add the Durham County CH voters, the number I get is 48,980.   Let's assume that 10% are no longer voters. That gives us 44,082 registered.  The mayor candidates received a total of 8,539 votes. That still doesn't get us to a 20% turnout.Very sad as I said on WCHL this morning and not a good statement about our sense of civic commitment or pride.  Winning by 99 votes is a win; loosing by 99 votes is a loss, but maybe the numbers tell us that we as a community really loose with a turnout like this.

I was at Ephesus Elementary, as was a very energetic older lady named Lynne Kane who was handing out her own list of endorsements (Matt Cz, Pohlman, DeHart, Pease). When I walked up with my Marcoplos Construction cap on she said, "Oh you must be Mark Marcoplos. I know of you - we're on different sides." Then she went on about the Sierra Club cabal (aided by Jenifer Strom at the Independent) that has been controlling Chapel Hill politics all these years. And she claimed to know that I was a member of this insidious conspiracy. So we bantered  and debated. It was amusing but sort of pointless because staying on point with her was like trying to nail jello to the wall. But I liked her spunk and I think she liked the fact that I wasn't as bad a person as she thought. At one point, my Blackberry vibrated and, hilariously, it was an e-mail from Bill Strom which I could not refrain from telling her. Having her world-view confirmed on election day may have been the highlight of her week. So as I left, I told her that I enjoyed hanging out with her and joked that at least she now knew that I didn't beat my pets. She responded, "Neither did Hitler."

One showed up on my door before the election, and at least I found it very confusing.  It had a stream of consciousness text that made it really hard to figure out who was behind it all, and a voter's guide on the bottom.  Ms. Kane's name was buried in the middle so you really had to read everything to figure out what she was trying to get across.And congratulations on the Hitler reference :-)  I hope she was joking... 

As for her Hitler reference - it was hard to tell. I expected something like "Nice talking to you, too." But I'll rememebr her actual response for far longer.She did have the Matt Cz over-simplified talking points down though. I'd approach a voter with a Penny Rich flyer in my hand and she'd bark, "Yeah, that's who's spending your tax money to campaign."

Any way to learn whose names were written in?  Curious, just curious.

Victory Night Celebration Video: Mark's Speech:http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=168771216866 http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=737642072329  Watching results as they were updated online: