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.
Looks like Allen Baddour will get the second Superior Court seat as he has retained the same small margin he had after the provisional ballots were counted last week.
It took all day Tuesday for the ballots to be recounted, but when the final count was in, Baddour had received 17,228 votes, and Stein had received 17,165, a 63-vote difference.
- heraldsun.com: Baddour retains Superior Court post
Since we had four very talented and qualified candidates running for these two seats, I knew we'd have a good judge coming out of it either way. I do regret that our community will never get to have Adam Stein on the bench, but we still benefit from his work in so many other ways.
Congratulations, Allen. It's certainly nice to see someone my own age in a respected position of authority. Give 'em hell!
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.
Well, it looks like it will be at least a few days before we have resolution on the second judicial seat in Superior Court district 15B. As we reported Tuesday night, Allan Baddour finished just 70 votes ahead of Adam Stein (who was less than 600 votes ahead of Chuck Anderson) in an extremely competitive race among very well-qualified candidates.
But the second incumbent, Judge Allen Baddour, finished only 70 votes ahead of challenger Adam Stein, a well-known Chapel Hill lawyer.
That's a lead of one-tenth of 1 percentage point.
The election was so close that even the fourth candidate, District Court Judge Charles Anderson, still finished within 1 percentage point of Baddour.
- N&O: Judge results have to wait
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.
This page has all the unofficial stats for Orange County election returns: http://www.co.orange.nc.us/elect/2006general/
As of now (moments after polls closing), we can see the absentee results:
Anderson BaddourFox Stein
Absentee Mail 107 110 211 193
One Stop 2072 1937 3856 2990
Provisional 0 0 0 0
Transfer 0 0 0 0
Total 2179 2047 4067 3183
Referendum Yes No
Absentee Mail 202 103
One Stop 3834 1781
Provisional 0 0
Transfer 0 0
Total 4036 1884
Everything else is as expected....
We're just four days out from the election now, so I'd be interested to hear some predictions on a couple fronts:
Obviously the most intense race locally is the well funded Superior Court race between incumbents Carl Fox and Allen Baddour, and challengers Chuck Anderson and Adam Stein.
-One thing I'll be watching with interest Tuesday night is Carl Fox's performance. During both the primary and the general, Fox has run the lowest profile campaign of the contenders. In the primary he finished first by a large margin nonetheless, likely owing to his name recognition and magnetic personality.
But that was the primary, and the wider electorate in the general is less likely to be familiar with Fox's record and personality. I think he'll probably still finish first, but by a much smaller margin, at least percentage-wise, than in the spring.
Just read on BlueNC that someone is trying to trick Chapel Hill voters by representing a list of Republican judicial candidates as Democrats. Don't they know we are some of the most educated voters in the state?
Yesterday, I received various complaints about deceptive Republican tactics during the early voting in Chapel Hill. Apparently, Republican canvassers are approaching people entering the polls and asking if they're Democrats. If the answer is “yes,†they are given a flyer and told "This is a list of our judicial candidates." The problem: the list contains only the Republican candidates! Because Party affiliation isn't listed on the ballot, voters are being misled.
- North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek quoted in Cheaters | BlueNC
If this is true, Republicans are even dumber (or more desperate) than I thought.
After I watched Mark Barrosso's kick-ass video (thanks, Dan) about the "Yes Men" of Chatham County, http://YouTube.com offered me a related link to another regional political video. It was segments of Republican challenger Colonel Steve Acuff during a recent debate with Democratic incumbent Congressmember David Price.
I managed to find the entire 75 minute video (that shows Price as well as Acuff) on Google Video and thought I'd share it here (in spite of the fact that it has Acuff's URL in it):
If anyone has the patience to watch the whole thing, let me know how it ends. ;-)
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