How many votes will it take?

Nancy Sims has a lament about the upcoming city elections.

What disturbs me most is the complete lack of interest I’m seeing and hearing from my friends, co-workers, students and people I encounter daily. Everyone wants to complain about the water main breaks and the streets buckling as well as the lack of recycling in their neighborhood or crime, etc. Yet, when I point out that this is an election year and they should get involved with a candidate, they look at me like I’m from another planet.

In the 2009 city elections, with an open Mayoral race and combined candidates spending more than $10 million, voter turnout reached almost 13%. Seriously. Mayor Parker was elected with little more than 100,000 votes cast.

Are you going to let 5 new people take to the Council table to make decisions on the future of this city without casting your vote?

There were actually 160,046 votes cast in the 2009 runoff election, according to the City Secretary. I’ve been thinking about the At Large #2 race, for which I’ll be running candidate interviews starting tomorrow, and some recent discussions have led me to try to put some numbers on it. Barring any surprises at the filing deadline, there will be eight candidates in this race. In such a crowded field, where the average candidate could expect to get 12.5% of the vote, reaching 20% is very likely to get you into a runoff. Recent history suggests that’s a good number to aim for as well. Here’s how the top two finishers in each race that led to a runoff fared over the past three elections:

2005 District B Galloway-Hall 37.54 Johnson 26.33 2005 District C Clutterbuck 20.03 Hittner 19.86 2005 At Large #2 Lovell 32.26 Aiyer 26.19 2007 District D Adams 33.38 Allen 25.84 2007 District E Sullivan 40.07 Dwyer 34.14 2007 At Large #5 Jones 27.77 Trevino 18.91 2009 Mayor Parker 30.49 Locke 25.85 2009 Controller Green 36.30 Khan 32.51 2009 District A Stardig 31.87 Lewis 21.79 2009 District F Laster 25.45 Hoang 24.59 2009 At Large #1 Costello 24.06 Derr 19.62 2009 At Large #2 Lovell 48.82 Burks 21.44 2009 At Large #5 Jones 42.15 Christie 36.39

With the exceptions of the 2009 Mayor’s race, in which all of the top four contenders exceeded 20%, and the 2009 Controller’s race, in which there were only three candidates, none of these races had as many as three candidates do as well as 20%, and as you can see in several of them only one reached that mark. In many of these races, there were at least six candidates as well.

What does that mean for the At Large #2 field? Well, we first have to ask how many votes are likely to be cast. With an essentially uncontested Mayor’s race and no controversial Constitutional amendments on the ballot (the 2005 electorate was swelled by the presence of the Double Secret Illegal Anti-Gay Marriage amendment), 2011 seems likely to look a lot like 2007. In 2007, there were 117,431 ballots cast in the Mayor’s race. Not everyone who voted for Mayor voted in other races, however. Only 101,030 ballots were cast in At Large #5. That represents a 14% undervote, which is actually pretty good when compared to the higher turnout years of 2005 (22% undervote in At Large #2) and 2009 (27% undervote in At Large #1), which makes sense when you realize that the smaller the electorate, the more hardcore the voter. The bottom line is that Jones and Trevino advanced to overtime with vote tallies of 28,056 and 19,100, respectively. As such, a vote target of 25,000 for the At Large #2 hopefuls is probably very realistic. If turnout is a bit lower, or if the undervote is a bit higher, a target of 15,000 votes might suffice.

Think about that. Fifteen thousand votes, in a city of 2.1 million people, might be enough to give one of these eight people a chance to win election to a citywide office. And that’s before we consider the runoff – Jones won hers in 2007 with 16,212 votes, by the way; Lovell won hers in 2005 with 18,428. All I can say is that if you didn’t vote, you had an awful lot of company.

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