Incumbents.
Marty (2,162), Larson (1,889) & Felner (1,699) are in. Etler & Etler made a respectable showing with a combined total of 1,439 but even with job sharing it’s wasn’t enough votes to break through the inertia of incumbency that has existed on the Wyoming School Board for the better part of a decade. To take a turn from American Express “Incumbency has its privileges”.
Digging deeper into the results, however, indicates that for the first time this decade in Board elections where there were more candidates than seats available – the real winner in yesterday’s election was “Anyone Else, Please !”
It’s not an exact science but here’s the logic.
Of the 6628 registered votes in Wyoming, 3321 voted in yesterday’s election, about 50%…not bad for an “off-year” election.
Each of those voters could vote for 3 people in the Board election – so there were 9963 “chips” available to spread out among the 5 candidates.
Interestingly, only 7189 “chips” were cast across all 5 candidates.
Rather than vote from among the 5 choices available yesterday, 2,774 “chips” voted for Anyone Else, Please, beating out all three incumbents.
This is Anyone Else, Please’s best showing this decade.
In 2003, the first year for which Board election results are available on-line, Anyone Else, Please came in last place. It was a weak showing, collecting only half of the “chips” he/she would have randomly received. In 2005, the next year in which there were more candidates than seats available, Anyone Else, Please did much better, running second in a 6 horse race gathering about 15% more “chips” than would have been expected randomly. In yesterday’s first place showing, Anyone Else, Please gathered almost 40% more “chips” than he/she would have randomly received. At some point (any statistician help here) that X% more stops being random and starts being real.
Rather than vote for any of the Board candidates available in yesterday’s election, 2,774 “chips” (the votes of almost 925 Wyoming residents, more than a quarter of the residents that invested time in the voting process yesterday) went to their polling place but went home without voting in the Board election. That 25% of actual voters sending the message – I can’t pick anyone off this list. That says a lot about the choices.
Unfortunately, Anyone Else, Please won’t get a seat at the Board table so we’ll have to wait for the 2011 election to see how he/she does against that field of candidates. Unless, of course, a seat happens to open up by coincidence between now and then…but I suspect the remaining Board members would view Anyone Else, Please too fringe to be considered as a replacement since that would make him/her an incumbent in the next election (and we’ve seen the power of incumbency in Wyoming – can’t share that with Anyone Else, Please).
[note: I did not include elections in which the number of candidates equaled the number of seats available. In those cases (2), Anyone Else, Please would have been the far and away winner but those situations are more formalities required by law than real elections so I thought it unfair to claim that Anyone Else, Please would have been the top vote getter in 3 of the last 5 elections. ]