Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Election 2008 tidbits

[UPDATE:  Final results entered, slight changes noted.]

Today’s the day that Washington’s 39 counties are supposed to submit their final certified results from the election that took place three weeks ago.  Those final reports are streaming in to the Secretary of State’s office even as we speak.

Though the county-by-county results aren’t quite all tallied, it’s close enough that we can begin to point out a number of (possibly) interesting items in the results.  As I write, the SoS appears to believe that there are only 100 ballots that haven’t yet been completely dealt with, and that number may be different by the time you, the reader, look at the voter turnout page on their website.  Whitman County was the last to report, at 9:41am on Wednesday.

What follows are some tidbits on the 2008 general election in Washington state.  Nearly all of them were observed on the Secretary of State’s website, though I may also pull some local King County information from the King County Elections site.  Also, I may add to the list as I run across additional interesting points. 

• Amazingly, King County appears to be the second county in the state to issue its final results.  Only San Juan County, which finished yesterday afternoon, was ahead of King.  It looks like the good people at King County Elections pulled an all-nighter, as their final report was timestamped at 4:11am today.
• Rounding is our friend, at least at the presidential level.  Most of the national sources show vote percentages as whole-number percentages, so Washington’s result will be displayed as 58% for Obama to 40% for McCain.  That looks a whole lot more impressive than it would if taken to two more decimal places, as the SoS does—57.65% to 40.48%.
• Edging up to 84.60% 84.61% turnout, the state has recorded its highest level of participation by eligible voters since at least 1952 (that’s as far back as the SoS displays it).  The previous record of 82.35% was set in 1960, ever so slightly above the 82.23% turnout in the last presidential cycle.  Washington’s turnout is regularly among the highest of all states.  The two counties still using polls, Pierce and King, were slightly lower than the state as a whole.  King County’s mail voters returned almost 86% of their ballots, and constituted a bit under 70% of the ballots cast in the county.
• John Kerry won 12 of the 39 counties in 2004.  This time, Barack Obama added Clallam, Clark, Island, Klickitat, Skagit, Skamania, Wahkiakum, and Whitman Counties to Kerry’s “usual suspect” Democratic counties.  That comes to 20 counties, a majority!
• Chris Gregoire cruised to a convincing win in her second battle with the soon-to-be-forgotten Dino Rossi.  She won’t quite make it to a 200,000 vote advantage, but her margin is something like 1500 times the size of her razor-thin 2004 edge.  Last time, she won only eight counties, the real Dem core of Cowlitz, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, King, Pacific, San Juan, Thurston, and Whatcom.  Though Cowlitz swtiched to Rossi, five other counties (Island, Kitsap, Pierce, Skagit, and Snohomish) moved into her column.  She won her counties by larger percentages this time, and cut her deficits in many other counties.
• It wasn’t us King County lefties who beat Tim Eyman this time.  In fact, the rest of the state voted NO on I-985 at a higher rate than did King—59.61% in King, 60.15% elsewhere.  And if you also remove Pierce, which inexplicably gave Eyman his only county win, 62.05% of voters in the other 37 counties rejected I-985.
• It’s no surprise, of course, that Jim McDermott cruised to an easy win in his “rematch” against hapless Steve Beren in the 7th Congressional District.  Just your standard-issue 84%-16% thrashing.  However, the actual number of votes for Jim—291,963—is quite impressive.  Though I haven’t made an exhaustive study, I’m fairly sure that only one other House member in the entire country received more votes than Jim did, and that’s mainly because MT-AL has by far the highest voting population of any Congressional District.  Last I checked, the winner exceeded 250,000 votes in only eight CDs.
• On first glance, it looks like two state legislative races will go to recounts.  In suburban Spokane’s LD6, House Position 2, Democrat John Driscoll leads Republican John Ahern by 74 votes (50.05% to 49.95%), and in Snohomish County’s LD44, House Position 2, it’s Republican Mike Hope ahead of Democrat Liz Loomis by 118 votes (50.09% to 49.91%).

As noted earlier, I may augment this little report as other points of interest come my way.  I’m looking forward to the release of King County’s complete precinct-by-precinct canvass ... I really want to know whether Obama won every single precinct in the city of Seattle.  Bush beat Kerry in one Seattle precinct in 2004.