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Statistical analysis of Washington Gubernatorial race
Washington Secretary of State ^ | 11/8/2004 | MPB

Posted on 11/08/2004 1:46:27 PM PST by MPB

Gregoire: 1,198,601
Rossi: 1,194,867

(Excerpt) Read more at vote.wa.gov ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Washington
KEYWORDS: election; governer; gregoire; rossi; washington
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I've just done a statistical analysis of the WA governor race...

They're still counting absentee ballots and judging from the current total and the web page that shows the estimate of how many ballots are left to count, I've extrapoloated the percentage of votes in each county that went to Rossi and Gregoire, and applied those percentages to the estimated uncounted ballots.

Doing that, I come up with:
Gregoire: 1,367,950
Rossi: 1,366,704

You'll notice that's a whopping 1,246 vote difference in favor of Gregoire. Sad...

However, the absentees may tend to favor one party or the other, so my analysis may be incorrect on that part. We can hope.

Either way, it looks like Rossi will continue to gain and this could very well be headed towards that automatic recount if it's under the 2000 vote difference.

1 posted on 11/08/2004 1:46:27 PM PST by MPB
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To: MPB

When dealing with Washington elections you should always include the LP "protest vote" factor.


2 posted on 11/08/2004 1:48:07 PM PST by CWOJackson
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To: MPB

Absentee are usually disperportionaly Military.
Did you factor that in? (We all know where the Military stands...)


3 posted on 11/08/2004 1:48:10 PM PST by konaice
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To: konaice

I hope but don't know if it's true that in WA state that absentee ballot's are largely military.

A large percentage of the voters in WA vote absentee. I hope Dino can pull out the victory, but it'll b e a happy surprise if that happens:)


4 posted on 11/08/2004 1:52:59 PM PST by not_apathetic_anymore
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To: konaice
I just went on the assumption that, per county, absentee's would break the same as the vote count so far in that county.

It can be true that absentee's favor Republicans because of the nearly 4-1 military favoring R over D. But in Washington, nearly 50% of all votes cast were absentee so I didn't want to skew anything... I guess we'll see how it plays out.

I couldn't find anything on the SoS website that shows how just the absentee ballots have been going so I wasn't able to check.

I did take into account the Libertarian votes from the current totals... I just didn't show those percentages. I still think that if that retard Ruth Bennett hadn't been in the election, more of the Libertarians would have voted R instead of D, or just not voted at all. :-P

5 posted on 11/08/2004 1:53:31 PM PST by MPB
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To: CWOJackson

But in this case, that 2% of votes is weird in and of itself - the Libertarian Candidate claims to have been trying to "steal votes from the Democrats" in order to "make a point" regarding Gay Marriage and all that crap...

But you are correct - any analysis should take the 2% "protest vote" into account.


6 posted on 11/08/2004 1:56:22 PM PST by Chad Fairbanks ("I get my own ammo, I have to pull the trigger myself, I have to wound myself. It's pretty amazing")
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To: MPB

I agree.

They didn't get the name "Losertarian" by accident.

They're losers in their own campaigns and in their ability to cause others to lose as well.


7 posted on 11/08/2004 1:57:30 PM PST by MplsSteve
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To: konaice

For Washington, I don't know if that is necessarily so - here, we have an unusually high absentee ballot percentage, and they can be mailed up to and including Election Day...


8 posted on 11/08/2004 1:58:05 PM PST by Chad Fairbanks ("I get my own ammo, I have to pull the trigger myself, I have to wound myself. It's pretty amazing")
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To: Chad Fairbanks
The LP candidate is trying to cover her own arse from backlash; she sure didn't make that distinction while running. The LP has consistently ran against Republican nominees in Washington hence their heavy advertising on "conservative" stations as the "alternative".

Only this time their "alternative" is against a conservative, Christian family man like Rossi.

9 posted on 11/08/2004 1:59:15 PM PST by CWOJackson
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To: CWOJackson

True enough. I was gonna ask "Whay in the heck possessed the Washington LP to run a homosexual left-wing agitator as their gubanatorial candidate?" But I think we all know the true answer to that...


10 posted on 11/08/2004 2:07:02 PM PST by Chad Fairbanks ("I get my own ammo, I have to pull the trigger myself, I have to wound myself. It's pretty amazing")
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To: Chad Fairbanks

Same answer as why did the "state" run ads which listed the LP equally with the two real parties.


11 posted on 11/08/2004 2:08:57 PM PST by CWOJackson
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To: Chad Fairbanks
Okay...

Just to be thorough, while I did include the LP vote totals in my analysis, here's info on how many votes Bennett has now:
52,657

And she'll gain a whopping 7,253 more votes out of the 348,440 absentee ballots left to count, giving her a grand total of 59,910, based on extrapolation.

I wonder if there are any theories regarding whether the insane, I mean Libertarian voters, are more likely to vote absentee rather than go into their polling place? On another note, I wonder how many forgot to vote because they were too stoned that day?

That gives me an idea for the upcoming 2006 election... give your Libertarian buddy a free bag of weed the day of teh election and hope they stay home and get wasted rather than vote.

12 posted on 11/08/2004 2:15:08 PM PST by MPB
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To: MPB; CyberCowboy777

Pinging Washington State Ping list...


13 posted on 11/08/2004 2:18:27 PM PST by The SISU kid (I'm the swizzle stick in the cocktail of life)
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To: MPB

Just like you, I have no idea how the absentee vote in King County is breaking. What is depressing is that King cout has an estimated 119000 votes to count. That is roughly as many as all the other counties in the state


14 posted on 11/08/2004 2:19:28 PM PST by eeman
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To: MPB

I ran the numbers on this race last Friday, and you are correct, that based on the overall percentages per county, Gregoire would win. I also ran the numbers with the county percentages slightly padded. It would take a conservative trend in the remaining absentees of less than 1% to push Dino over the top.

There are a number of reasons to think that may well be happening. First, I've heard from Doug Timpe (1st/32nd district chair) that the absentees are indeed trending more conservative. Second, towards the end of last week a large number of King county votes were added, and yet the margins didn't really increase for Gregoire.

What would be the most useful would be the county percentage breakdowns of the absentees, rather than having to do it with an overall percentage. That would be a lot more accurate. That being said, the biggest question at this point is whether the votes counted for King county thus far are out of one big stack, or if they're geographically based (all from Bellevue for example). We should know a lot more in a couple of days.


15 posted on 11/08/2004 2:31:14 PM PST by HumbleButExceedinglyAccurate
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To: eeman
Just like you, I have no idea how the absentee vote in King County is breaking. What is depressing is that King cout has an estimated 119000 votes to count.

That's true, but only a few counties favored Gregoire over Rossi, and in those counties the lead Gregoire has isn't that great. The ballots left to count in other counties does indicate that Rossi will continue to gain on Gregoire, but by how much is unknown.

Fortunately, most of the King, Pierce and Snohomish absentee's have already been counted, and that was why Gregoire was as much as 18,000 votes ahead last week, but as the other counties post their tallies, Rossi is catching up once again.

I only pray that trend continues long enough for him to pass her up and retake the lead he had before the absentee's started to be counted

That, by the way is a good "best guess" way of extrapolating how the absentee's will break... Rossi was ahead of Gregoire before the absentee counts started to come in, so if they broke at the same percentage as the folks who went to the polls, Rossi *should* still come out ahead in the end. We'll just have to see.

Once the SoS updates the website with new tallies, I'll rerun the analysis and see if it's trending one way or the other. :)

16 posted on 11/08/2004 2:31:37 PM PST by MPB
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To: HumbleButExceedinglyAccurate
being said, the biggest question at this point is whether the votes counted for King county thus far are out of one big stack, or if they're geographically based (all from Bellevue for example). We should know a lot more in a couple of days. I don't know how they do it, but yeah, that would be nice to have that info, but I haven't found that. Bellevue would be a lot more conservative (well, relatively speaking) than Seattle, so it would be nice to know if the precincts from King County that came in last week were from a certain area.

I think however that *all* precincts continue to report their updated absentee votes since they may still be getting mail coming in that was postmarked in time. You know... that's the USPS for ya.

I would hazard a guess that the larger precincts are the ones who've already finished counting since they probably have more staff available to help out, so we very well could have already seen a Democrat "surge" in the totals, since large population centers trend heavily Democrat.

Keep those fingers crossed!

17 posted on 11/08/2004 2:35:27 PM PST by MPB
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To: MPB
New numbers:

The 2:52 PM update on the SoS website... no huge increase in any totals...

Updating my analysis based on the handful of new results shows Rossi only losing by 1242 votes instead of 1246, so at least that's trending in the right direction.

Still 348,445 estimated absentees left to count.

18 posted on 11/08/2004 3:14:03 PM PST by MPB
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To: MPB
Another update... bigger this time.

King County just reported in a whole load of updated tallies... they now only have an estimated 46,000 outstanding absentees left to count.

The overall # doesn't look good, with Gregoire now 16,567 votes ahead of Rossi.

However, I see now using my same analysis that once all the absentees are counted in all counties, Rossi will be behind only 1,977 votes.

What that implies is that King County's totals went more Democrat than we would have liked to see, but things are still looking within range.

273,445 absentees left to count. So out of 75,000 votes just updated, most of them from King County, Gregoire's lead went up, but in the final analysis it's still neck and neck overall.

19 posted on 11/08/2004 4:12:49 PM PST by MPB
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To: MPB
After another big update, probably the last for Monday:

Gregoire: 1,252,772
Rossi: 1,242,524
Bennett: 55,016

What's interesting are the county tallies... now my analysis is showing that even though Rossi is currently lagging by 10,248 - once all the estimated absentees come in he'll actually be *ahead* by 78 (yup... 78 votes).

Part of that is that while King County still has 46,000 left to count, and Gregoire won King County by roughly 57.6%, there are enough other counties where Rossi is already leading (like Pierce, Snohomish, Clark, Lewis, Skagit, etc) to more than balance the King County factor and make up the current 10,000 deficit.

In fact, of the 8 counties (out of 39 total) in which Gregoire is currently leading, only 4 of those has her winning by any significant percentage: King, Jefferson, San Juan and Thurston. And let's face it, only King County has any significant amount of votes left to tally.

So while we do see some yo-yo'ing as more results come in, I am still seeing that overall, Gregoire and Rossi are likely to be within 2000 votes of each other which would at least get a mandatory recount.

On a side-note, if the difference is less than 150 votes, the mandatory recount must be done *manually*... yup... by hand. Ouch. I'd hate to have that job.

20 posted on 11/08/2004 5:33:47 PM PST by MPB
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