Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Arizona election results

The good news: Arizona did not elect aspiring theocrat Len Munsil (who was soundly defeated by incumbent Governor Janet Napolitano), got rid of corrupt Congressman J.D. Hayworth (replacing him with former Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell), narrowly voted down an amendment to the state Constitution to ban gay marriage and anything "similar to" it, and voted in favor of greater protections against eminent domain abuse.

The bad news: Arizona re-elected Sen. Jon Kyl and Rep. Rick Renzi, approved the creation of a new bureaucracy to continually raise the minimum wage (the main effect of which is to reduce teen employment; it has negligible positive effects for low wage earners, versus something that would genuinely be effective like reducing payroll taxes), passed the worse of the two anti-smoking measures, banned probation for methamphetamine abuse offenses, and passed all of the anti-illegal immigration measures (declaring English the official language, prohibiting illegal immigrants from posting bail or being awarded certain kinds of damages in court, and limiting educational services to illegal immigrants).

Teenager Jarrett Maupin (Al Sharpton, Jr.) was elected to the Phoenix Union High School District Board in Ward 2. Maupin, who was a member of the Republican club at Brophy College Prep before switching schools to St. Mary's and becoming a Democrat and protege of Sharpton, charged that Brophy students demonstrated their racism by referring to "blackboards."

4 comments:

Richie Rich said...

sorry to tell you, but the JD Hayworth race isn't over yet - somehow the Arizona election officials missed 250K votes in Maricopa county.

Lippard said...

There are 250,000 early ballots that were *not returned*, and that's across the whole county, not just District 5. It seems to me that early ballots should have to be delivered no later than election day.

Of those 250,000 early ballots that haven't been returned, 48 percent were requested by Republicans and 34 percent by Democrats, which leaves another 18 percent from other parties and independents.

I'm pretty sure the Hayworth race is over. Of 140,819 votes cast, Mitchell got 71,077, Hayworth got 65,122, and Severin got 4,620. If 25% of the 250,000 ballots are returned and are for District 5, match the above percentages for party distribution, all Republicans vote for Hayworth, all Democrats vote for Mitchell, and 1/3 of the independents vote for Hayworth (which is generous) and 2/3 for Mitchell, that closes the gap by 5,000 votes--almost a thousand too few.

Lippard said...

Now today's Republic says that there actually are 258,500 ballots left to be counted (that they have in their possession), but says that includes 63,000 early ballots dropped off at polls and 37,000 provisional ballots given out at the polls. They are counting about 25,000 of them per day. The result of yesterday's counting was that Hayworth closed the gap by 23 votes. If that pattern continues over the 10 or 11 days it will take them to count the leftovers, he'll clearly lose.

Lippard said...

After six days of counting (and with perhaps five more to go), Hayworth has closed the nearly-6,000 vote gap with Mitchell by fewer than 500 votes.