By now, you likely know the results. There are many places to find them, here’s a few and some commentary. Clerk’s website. Here’s how the results rolled in at the liberal party at the Argus. Here’s the results from madison.com.
COUNTY BOARD (BORED?) RESULTS
For those who don’t want to look at all the numbers or want a little interpretation of what happened, here’s what happened on county board:
District 1 – Scott McDonell (I) beat Dennis Amadeus deNure handily with 83% of the vote. Makes one wonder who the 79 people were who voted for Dennis.
District 3 – Donald J. Imhoff beat Elaine H. DeSmidt for the only lost liberal seat of the evening.
District 4 – Brett Hulsey (I) whomped the Dane County Deputies, er, Greg Hull with nearly 70% of the vote.
District 5 – Analiese Eicher beat Michael Johnson for Wyndham Mannings seat with the two of them only getting 261 of over 10,000 voters to the polls. By comparison, many candidates got over 1,000 votes themselves. Lowest student turn out anyone can remember.
District 7 – Matt Veldran (I) keeps his seat, beating Mike Thomsen
District 12 – Paul Rusk wins comfortably over Rick Raulin
District 15 – Ronn Ferrell (I) keeps his seat by only 43 votes
District 16 – Dave de Felice (I) keeps his seat over Ryan Jennissen tho there was some serious hand-wringing over that one.
District 18 – Melissa Sargent won all her wards over Nancy Wild for Dorothy Wheeler’s seat.
District 19 – Bill Clausius wins over Steve Schwartzer both conservatives, this was the other liberal lost seat with the Jeff Kostelic resignation. This seat was lost in the primary.
District 20 – Duane Gau (I) handily kept his seat over Gordon Shea
District 21 – David E. Wiganowsky won by a comfortable margin over Harvey E. Potter
District 24 – Robin R. Schmidt kept her seat beating Pat Barry
District 26 – Sharon Corrigan beat Joshua Gamer for Mark Opitz seat.
District 27 – Kyle R. Richmond got nearly 70% of the vote over Jeffrey Kritch
District 28 – Kurt Schlicht whomped Bob Green with over 70% of the vote.
District 30 – Patrick Downing beat Donald Steinhauer in one of the closer races of the evening.
District 33 – Jack Martz beat Sam Cooke in another close one.
District 34 – Patrick Miles squeaked by Spencer Zimmerman
District 35 – Denise Duranczyk beat Dave Siitari
So, after that, the liberal majority on the county board went from 25-12 to 23 – 14. They need 19 seats to keep the majority, and did that handily. So, not much changed after all that.
MADISON METROPOLITAN SCHOOL BOARD
Many may not have even noticed there was a race. This is the least amount of campaign lit I have ever gotten. It might be because I moved, but it was hard to know there was a race going on. James Howard won with a surprising 63% over Tom Farley who barely made it on to the ballot.
THAT TURN OUT SUCKED
8% in the County? (via channel 3). That’s less than the 11% expected statewide. Pretty sad Madison, at 3% (via channel 27). Yikes. No running out of ballots here. No 50% turn out. No one cares? Or no one knows cuz the county and school board coverage in the media is so scarce?
OK, HOW’D YOU GET THE ELECTION RESULTS SO QUICKLY?
For those of you I tried to (and kind of failed) keep up to date via twitter and facebook here’s how we know what happened before the clerk’s office gets in info on their sites.
1. Send a volunteer to each of the wards in each of the campaigns at 8:00 when the polls close.
2. When the polls close, wait patiently while poll workers get their work done, run the tapes and then ask for an extra tape from the machine.
3. Call the campaign manager with the results so they can let the candidates know.
4. In the case of the county board, call someone at the Argus to spread the word who won.
5. Go to candidates party in their district or grab a beer at the Argus with others.
6. Meanwhile, the clerks’ office doesn’t have the numbers until the poll workers pack up, drive to the city-county building and hand in the results. Then the clerk’s office puts them up on the website. Then the media reports the results unless they heard by one of the other sources. So, standing at the Argus was the fastest way to get results. I think all the results were in by 9:00. In less than an hour.
It doesn’t work that smoothly when there is higher voter turnout, because sometimes they need to run all the absentee ballots. Also, sometimes a machine breaks down.
SORRY
I did have the near perfect plan to get you the results as we got them . . . but the internet connection sucked. And twitter started failing on the Isthmus live blog. So I tried to correct on the spot, but gave up due to all the distractions and answering people’s questions as they walked in the door.
ALL IN ALL
Yawn. Blaska was wrong, again. They didn’t pick up 5 seats. The poll the Dane County Public Affairs Council must have had some flaws in the strategery. And likely, not much will change. Conservatives are still pretty deep in the minority and liberals are still liberals. And the School Board has 1 of 7 members that is new. Likely, the most interesting thing to watch at this point is who Doyle will appoint to Blanchard’s DA position.
