Brian’s Utah Weblog

One answer to the mystery of why Utah Democrats didn’t have a wave election this year is that we did and just don’t know it. I disagree but proponents have four strong points,

1. Representative Carl Duckworth (D-Magna)
2. Representative Laura Black (D-Murray)
3. Representative Jay Seegmiller (D-Sandy)
4. County Auditor Jeff Hatch (D-Salt Lake)

These look like pretty weak arguments since all of these candidates lost last Tuesday. But between the Trib article yesterday and the news I have from Democratic Party insiders watching the ballot verification process, there is reason for hope.

• Duckworth needs 25 more votes in district 22
• Black needs 32 more votes in district 45
• Seegmiller needs 46 more votes in district 49
• Hatch needs 344 more votes countywide

There are about 600 paper ballots in Salt Lake County requested by voters who could have used electronic machines but didn’t want to. None of them have been counted yet. Consider who makes a special request to vote on paper ballots. Those votes will be from skeptics of unrestrained government power, paper ballot and verifiable voting activists, and computer programmers who know just how unreliable Diebold’s design is. In other words, Democrats.

Also paper ballot voters will be Ashdown voters as the Pete Ashdown campaign was the only organized effort asking Utah voters to vote on paper.

The net result should be a Democratic advantage in those 600 ballots even stronger than Democrats’ early voting advantage. Probably the Democrats will win 3-1 or more. That would be about 300 net votes for Jeff Hatch and 10 votes each for Democrats running in legislative seats. But the demographic of voting activists means those district margins are likely to be much greater in districts like 45 and 49 with lots of middle class professionals. Duckworth is unlikely to get anything like 10 net votes in district 22 which is more blue collar.

Then there are 10,000 or more absentee and provisional ballots.

About 7,000 provisionals are likely to be found valid, most of them cast by voters who moved within Salt Lake county and didn’t reregister in time. Those usually trend Democratic so there should be a few votes in there for Democrats in close races. The demographic moving into district 22 is more Republican than current residents so it might not help Duckworth but the new residents in districts 49 and 45 are more Democratic than the older residents.

And there are the 3000 late absentees. They’re late because they arrived the week of the election or later, though postmarked before the election. We know that early voters were much more likely to vote Democratic than election day voters in Utah’s 2006 election but we don’t know the trends of absentee voters as clearly.

I have the absentee voter list right here in front of me and looking at the absentees returned in the last week of October as compared to the two previous weeks I see an accelerating trend of Democratic registered voters returning ballots more reliably than Republicans. And there are enough Democratic voters’ ballots listed as requested and still out for the final week to keep the trend up.

At the end of the last week of October absentees were at 40% D, 28% R, 32% I. That is in spite of a countywide Republican registration advantage. Note that independents were swinging strongly D in the early voting.

Going into the last week I see at least 41 D, 35 R, and 57 independent absentee ballots requested and outstanding in the Curtis-Seegmiller race (not including voters whose information is incomplete, about 15%). With a good independent swing, that will be a very close race. Let’s hope that Republicans find the leadership elections where they reelected corrupt Speaker Curtis prove very premature.

Get Out The Vote!

There’s a new poll in the right hand column (on the main page, click the top banner to get there). Don’t worry if you don’t know for sure; this is your chance for wild speculation before the general canvass Tuesday. Vote now, the polls will close when the county counts the actual votes.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 12:37 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.