Election dissection pt. 2

I had a chance to do a little number crunching myself.

There were 31,966 votes cast in the mayor's race yesterday. Each of those voters could have cast up to 3 votes for city council, making a total of 95,898 votes available. Only 82,286 votes were actually cast.

That's 13,360 votes that were left on the table.

Now, it's possible that there were 13,360 voters who all selected only two candidates for council. Equally, it's possible that there 4,543 voters who didn't bother to check off any of the candidates. But it's more likely, i think, given that most of the endorsers selected three candidates, except the Durham Committee, which only endorsed one candidate, that most of the missing votes came from ballots in which Farad Ali was the sole candidate selected.

Which would mean there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,680 voters who did so.

Given that Ali finished just over a thousand votes ahead of David Harris, i'm rethinking my earlier contention that the lack of endorsement by the Committee was not the critical factor in the election. It's certainly possible that had Harris run a different campaign and finished higher in the primary, the "split progressive vote" factor would not have worked against him.

But it's clear that, with so many missing votes in the final tally, the Committee's endorsement of just a single candidate was a major factor in how things played out.

So put me back in the camp of those who say that not getting the Committee's endorsment cost David Harris a seat on council.