City Election Breakdown

     After each election I like to break the numbers down and see if our voters liked their options which is especially important since we have another election in a few months to fill the open Council seat. There are two ways to look at the numbers. 1st we can look at just numbers from people that voted for one of the candidates. The 2nd way is to look at the total number of voters and see how many votes were not cast at all for any candidate. This 2nd way gives a pretty good idea if the voters liked their choices.

     So for the Council race we had 2,904 total votes (people had 2 votes each) of which write ins and no vote won with 839 total votes. Lorinser who had a good total vote of 838 or 29% of the total lead the way for filed candidates with Larson and Ham coming in with 21% each. Many people did not vote for any candidate or only voted for one candidate with various reasoning. The fact does remain however that roughly a 1/3 of all potential votes were not cast for any candidate and that is a lot of votes to go unused especially when you consider these people are in the booth voting for someone.

     In the Mayor's race we have a different story. Of those that voted between Rosen and myself I received 70% of the vote but when you take into consideration those that did not vote I received 65% of the total and Rosen received 28%, .5% for write ins and just 6.5% voted for no one.

     So what does this mean - well either there was a whole lot of strategic voting going on in the Council race or the voters wanted more options..... I think we have some excellent candidates running for the 2 year seat and I could not be happier we have a good Council Member like Lorinser re-elected for another 4 year term. I hope these percentages will improve though and that the voters will hear enough in the future to feel comfortable using their votes.