POST SCRIPTS

Jack:

We should see news and vote tally updates during the next 28 days.

The 28 day window is the time that the Elections Office has to complete various tasks to compile, test, verify and certify the final vote counts.

“28 days” is the text-book answer

We should know the number of uncounted ballots by Friday 11/07/08. There will be many thousands of them.

At this point in 2006 I believe that there were over 13,000 county wide. The number should be larger this time.

The number of ballots should fall into these 3 main categories:
1) Mail-in ballots received prior to Election Day, but not run through the verification process early enough to be included Election Night counts. I think that in 2006 election night total only included mail-in ballots received by the previous Saturday. I have no idea where the cut off was this time.
2) Mail-in ballots received at the Elections Office and polling places on Election Day
3) Provisional Ballots

Yes, it will be around Thanksgiving before we know the final vote counts, but we should see the number of uncounted ballots reported this Friday, and will probably see one vote tally update reflecting the late mail-in ballots 5-10 days after that, then another update reflecting Provisional ballots, with the final numbers coming out during the last week of November.

I hope to be receiving updates from the Elections Office as fast as the press, and plan to post updated information here:

www.marksorensen.net

While the number of uncounted ballots is large enough to change the Chico City Council outcome it is statistically unlikely to do so. Primarily because the late mail-in and provisional ballots tend to follow the voting pattern of the election night poll voting.

But, twice in the past 10 years these ballots did change the outcome. Most significantly around 2000 when I think that Ed McLaughlin fell from the #2 spot and out of contention, and again in 2002 when at this stage of the game Scott Gruendl was assumed to have won ahead of Larry Wahl. But, the late mail-in/provisional ballots changed that outcome, Larry won. Mr. Gruendl came back two years later to win.

But because this year’s mail-in ballots were much more evenly divided between DEM and REP, and due to the county, state & national voting trends, I expect to see the top candidates in the election move up in numbers much the way they did from Election Night poll voting... Suggesting that the top 4 today, will be the top 4.

I'd much prefer that the late mail-ins follow the pattern of the early mail-ins ;-)

At the current time our lone conservative in the race, Larry Wahl, is hanging on by a razor thin margin and only a few votes seperate him from the next runner up, Mark Sorensen.

This will continue until conservative voters start paying attention to what is going on around them locally, as we did in the early to mid nineties. That being said, I have come to the conclusion that conservatives are suffering from the success of Big talk radio. Allow me to explain why I say this, and maybe your new contributor to Post Scripts can tell me if he thinks I have a point or just blowing smoke.

When Rush and his firebrand conservative talk show first came to our area he hit it off with the audience like an ice cream vendor playing music outside a day care center. We could not get enough of him, but he was over by noon and we still had the rest of the day to go. Well, thats when AM radio in our area did like so many others did around the country. They saw a bonanza in their revenues and decided to change more of their format hours to talk radio.

They found local talent that could give the audience what they wanted, more talk radio talking about the things that the MSM wasn't covering. In Chico we started paying attention to what the local politicians were doing and for the first time in years we started getting conservatives elected to the city council, school board, and even gained control of the county. What we saw in Chico was happening across the country, talk radio was changing the political landscape and turning normal people like me into political junkies who began watching what the politicians were doing.

The changes we made to our local political landscape, were mimicked at the state level. Republicans won the state assembly for the first time in decades, and the changes were again mimicked across the country. In 1994 republicans won the House and Senate, and we all thought things would be great from here on out. It has been said we thought we won so we stopped teaching, well that is partially true.

See, thats when competition started to push the local guys out of the way. This is not to bash competition, but facts are facts. Radio stations want and need to make money, so the voice who sells advertising time will win the time slot. Like Chico, most people in rural America are not as entertaining as most hosts, their not as well spoken, and their lives are just plane boring. So slowly the small local personalities were replaced by the national hosts, like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Dr Laura, and the Michael Savages.

Local issues stopped being talked about, people went back to how they thought before. They again stopped paying attention to the local politicians. So, I guess while we may have kept talking about conservative ideas, we quit talking about what was happening locally, or what is important to the local areas. Lets be honest, whats more interesting the fight over the local compost site, or the fight over terrorism?

Now people still care about what is happening but they care more about the national issues and the national races. Slowly the city council, school board, and county seat have all went back to the balance they were before, all repopulated by mostly liberals. The local council members moved to bigger pastures like assembly and other offices or just went back to their businesses. The conservatives who were chosen to replace them couldn't receive enough support to get elected. The local cheerleaders across the country have been replaced by national cheerleaders who have no connection and no understanding of local issues.

Like Chico, this problem is repeated in small to mid sized towns and rural America across the country. This is backed up by what took place this week in the election. We lost because conservatives across the country who were fired up in 1994 did not get out to vote. We can blame McCain all we want, but even as boring and as bad as Bob Dole was in 1998, at least we still had local communities fired up to vote.

The voters in rural America still cared because we still had a local guy cheering us on. Now the only cheerleaders we have rooting us on are from thousands of miles away, what do you really expect to happen. It takes locality to get locals interested in their local governments, and until the small rural areas can find local talent as good as the Big guys, even for just two hours a day. Well, we will continue to loose the grass root conservatives, and without a Grass root conservative movement we all never change things on the national level.

The “Anointed One” won through a strong grass root, albeit illegal, effort. My question is why did we concede what was our strongest asset to a socialist? Is their no good local talk hosts who can be entertaining, truthful, and real? If not, then we will continue to loose. But hey? At least we do control talk radio with big voices like Rush Limbaugh's telling us to get involved, when we never do.

So when I read that we only have one conservative who might win a seat on Chico's city council, I think we need to find a way to fire up the locals again.

As of today the County Elections office estimates that there are 16,530 ballots still to be counted within the County of Butte.

.... That is a smaller number than I was expecting.