The unofficial election results are in. Out of 13,271 registered voters, 4,203 turned out, for a rate of 31.67%.

It appears our councilmen will be Timothy Brown, Susan Scott and my good buddy Walter Steed. (Brown at least said he would have opposed the smoking ban.)

Here’s where it gets amusing: The unofficial results have John Weber (2,055) losing to Nancy Chaney (2,095). Assuming those numbers hold…

That’s a difference of 40 votes.

~12.5% of the votes Weber needed to bridge the gap can be accounted for just in people who were in my house today. People who would have voted for him if he hadn’t behaved like a little tyrant on the city council. People who didn’t vote for Nancy Chaney.

What’s more, we’re political activists and would have gladly campaigned for a pro-liberty candidate (especially against Nancy Chaney), and could have easily drummed up those other 36 votes, and then some. I absolutely guarantee it – The Inconvenience and I just came up with about ten names in twenty seconds, and those are just friends, several of whom would have also campaigned. If each of us recruited just two or three strangers, John Weber would be mayor of Moscow.

Oh, how satisfying this is. The election I didn’t even vote in is the election I’ve inadvertently impacted most.

EDIT: A friend on Facebook made the point that it’s possible Weber would have lost votes had he not voted in favor of the smoking ban, which is true.

Here’s a breakdown, though: Anti-ban Timothy Brown won his seat with 51 fewer votes than Weber received for the mayoral position, and pro-ban Walter Steed won his with eight fewer votes than Weber.

So, pro-ban and anti-ban candidates with otherwise fairly similar platforms wound up in a ~50 vote range of one another. Even if you assume every vote separating Timothy Brown from Steed or Weber was due to his difference of opinion on the smoking ban, and thus assume they are all votes Weber would have lost had he voted differently, you’re still talking about a less than 100 vote loss to Chaney.

And, I again maintain that 5-10 dedicated campaign volunteers (especially ones capable of getting out the vote on campus, which is a majorly untapped voter pool in municipal elections) could have easily secured that many votes for Weber.

Last Modified: Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 @ 01:09

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 12:39 am and is filed under Moscow, Politics, University of Idaho. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.