Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

The Arizona Daily Star reported this morning that the Democrats are ahead on returned early ballots. Those aren’t requests, but returns.

The thing that is worth noting here is that most of our losing council candidates of the last decade or so have won on election day, but already lost because of the heavy lead that the Republicans established on early ballots. If we had a better early balloting program in the past, Mayor Tom Volgy* would be running ads asking voters to re-elect Councilmembers Paula Aboud and Gayle Hartman.

It also looks like the Republicans are behind their previous absentee ballot totals. For example, Mike Jenkins, the poorest performing Republican in the 2003 election, recieved 11,516 votes, roughly two-fifths of his total, from early ballots. So far with a week to go, the Republicans have only cast 7,277 early ballots.

This is not to say that all the Democratic ballots will be straight ticket Democrats, but it does give a huge advantage going into election day. In the past, Democrats have been happy with less ballots returned than the Republicans, as long as it wasn’t too much less.

The Republicans may be demoralized this year; there are plenty of distractions for them. Whereas the Democratic party has what one local wag has said is the best grass roots operation it has ever had. What you are seeing here is the residual energy built from last year’s presidential campaigns. We were just building up the charge in the capacitor, now we throw the switch.

NB - Although the common story among local Democrats is that Volgy won on election day 2003, this is not the case. Volgy narrowly lost on both early ballots and on election day. He came as close as he did because the party had a very good early balloting program that year. Given that he only lost by 3000 votes (about 2%), it does still lead one to wonder what would have happened with a program with the quality of this one.

On the subject of the Star, I have added this blog to their forums section.

Also, I have one last note on early ballots. I have encountered voters who seem to think that absentee ballots are only counted in a close race. This is not true. Until the 1990’s, absentee ballots (as they were then called) were counted last. As such, often the media would only report the results of an absentee ballot count in a close race, where they would change the outcome. This seems to be how this rumor started. Nowadays because of changes in technology, early ballots are counted and reported first, before any election day ballots are counted.