About those California numbers... [View All]

The media is portraying this as something as a landslide for A.S. The numbers don't back this up. But the way the media shows the data makes it hard to see. On the yes/no question, the news stories I've seen tend to express the results as percentages. But with the candidates, they show the raw numbers. Furthermore, they are not even showing the total number of votes for a candidate. But I couldn't even find that information on the CA Secretary of State site.

These are the numbers as of 6:53 am (California time) with 97.9% of precincts reporting:

http://vote2003.ss.ca.gov/Returns/recall/00.htm
yes to recall 4,158,225 54.6%
no on recall 3,465,666 45.4%
total 7,623,891

http://vote2003.ss.ca.gov/Returns/gov/00.htm
Schwarzenegger 3,528,093 48.0%
total* 7,350,194

*I got the total by dividing 3,528,093 by .48 and rounding, so it's an estimate but a good one, I think.

If you look at the "no" vote on the recall as a vote for Davis, the difference (about 62,000) is almost negligible (the number of votes for Arnold is less than 2% greater than the number of "no" votes on the recall). However, this isn't quite fair. A vote of "no" on the recall is a clear expression that a voter's first preference is to keep Gray Davis in office. But votes for A.S. comprise two categories -- (1) voters who voted yes on the recall and yes on the candidate and (2) voters who voted NO on the recall and yes on the candidate. In other words, some undefined number of Arnold's votes would have gone to Davis if the election had simply been a matchup between Davis, Schwarzenegger, and the other candidates. Is that number greater than Schwarzenegger's 62,000 "margin" in our earlier scenario? Democracy has not been served well. The argument many were making before the election -- that Schwarzenegger could win the election even if a greater number of voters prefer keeping Davis in office than having Arnold replace him -- seems to have been proven valid.

Of course, all of this is assuming that, first of all, the numbers don't change dramatically between 97.9% reporting and 100% reporting (I already had to update my numbers one from an hour ago when Arnold's "lead" over Davis was only about 1% instead of 2% -- it jumped from 38,000 to 62,000). It also assumes no voting irregularities or downright fraud, which I'm not at all confident about.

Incidentally, does it seem plausible that roughly 274,000 people voted yes or no on the recall but did not choose a candidate? I guess I can see that if people misunderstood the instructions (voted no on the recall and then did not select a candidate) or voted either way on the recall but then got confused by all the names and decided to skip it. Or even neglected to choose a candidate as a protest against the recall. But what about all the stories about people voting for a candidate but forgetting to vote on the recall question? I'm not alleging anything, I'm just wondering what everyone else thinks of this.

Comments?