AN INTERESTING PERSPECTIVE ON THE WARD TWO RACE ~ Annapolis Capital Punishment
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Thursday, December 20, 2007

AN INTERESTING PERSPECTIVE ON THE WARD TWO RACE

The below unsolicited message was forwarded to me by a local Green Party member. See the below post for official results. This note is worth pondering:

If you were to take the ratio of registered voters in a certain party to number of votes for that party's candidate, you can get approximate measures of party support and the ability of the candidate to attract unaffiliated voters or those from another party.

Despite having the benefit of 49% of the registered voters, McKerrow only got 38% of the votes, or 78% party support; Paone had only 34% of the registered voters, but got 45% of the votes, for a value of 132% party support. But Karen, who only had 0.68% of the registered voters in the ward to draw on, collected 17% of the vote for a value of 2500% party support! She obviously did an excellent job of pulling in voters from outside our party.

CP continues to ask why we need (or don't need) partisan local elections. Any ideas???



4 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I am by no means a math or statistics major, but this proposition as presented does not add up to me ...
Is the author suggesting that 78% of the registered democrats came out to vote and all voted for McKerrow, and that 132% of republicans voted for Paone??? This is impossible

Please clarify

Paul Foer said...

Scott There are all kinds of ways to carve up this pie. The writer, I believe, is suggesting that if voters turned out in numbers proportionate to their actual registered ratios, one would have expected the Democratic candidate to receive 49% of the votes, the Republican to get 34% and the Green to receive 0.68%. Instead the Green (Jennings) received 250 times the votes one would have expected based upon Green Party affiliation. However, R and D votes were almost inverted in this case, again, based upon overall party affiliation. What does all this mean? That Republicans turned out a disproportionate amount of voters, Greens even more so and Democrats far less? Does it mean that Independents voted for Greens in great numbers, and possible Democrats did as well? Who knows. It's one ward, and I have no idea if there is any great meaning behind any of these numbers, although I suspect if anyone who should be concerned about what they might mean, it's the Democrats--but again, who knows?. Thanks for the note.

Mike Van said...

While I am also not a math or statistics major, statistical campaigning and political number crunching have been my hobby now for over 10 years. What I get from these numbers is exactly what Mr. Foer was saying, the Greens got out the vote; the R's and D's? Not so much. In any case, hazaa to all who participated. I look forward to a day when everyone is registered and everyone votes.

Paul Foer said...

Thanks Mike:

Its hard to tell if we can learn anything of real import from a special election with such a small sample. But--it can be interesting and fun for pundits to ponder...All that really matters is whether Fred Paone will do a good job. We wish him the best.

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