It’s time to focus on the task at hand, electing the Democrat slate of statewide candidates and returning substantial majorities to the House and Senate. We’re finally ready to move past deadlock in Montpelier.

Among the rest of the Vermont electorate, there are three groups.

1. Democrats and Progressives who can be counted on to support our candidates: about 36% of the electorate. We have to get these people to the polls. They are concentrated in Windham, Windsor, Washington and Chittenden counties. Rolling up big turnouts in those 4 counties is essential.

2. GOP stalwarts who are as partisan on the other side as we are on ours: about 28% of the electorate. About 15% are Tea Party types.

So the partisan voters in Vermont use up about (36 + 28) 64%, or two-thirds, of the electorate.

3. The independents. Generally speaking they break 60-40 in favor of Democrat candidates (this is readily seen in the downticket statewide results). In other words the 36% of independents generally break 21% – 15% for Dems, so for any given standard Dem vs GOP race it should work out to

36 + 21 vs 28 + 15, or 57% – 43%.

Even if the independents break 50-50 the Dems have a big advantage:

36 + 18 vs 28 + 18, or 54% – 46%

So I’d argue that promoting a big Democrat turnout is really the single most important thing we need to accomplish between now and November.

Dubie does not have the profile Jim Douglas had. Jim Douglas knew or had shook hands with nearly half the Vermont electorate; he is the ONLY candidate who has broken the independent pattern in Vermont, and he’s done it on the strength 40 years of public service of a type that put him in position to attend every ribbon cutting ceremony. Gov Scissorhands had the nickname before he was elected. With Jim Douglas out of the picture, and a need to turn out the base being of primary importance, the statewide candidates need to highlight the traditional GOP positions Dubie and the rest are wedded to: ProLife, anti-healthcare-reform, etc.

I hope the statewide candidates work out a comprehensive campaign effort that has them working together.

http://www.benningtonbanner.co…

“Racine Campaign Manager Amy Shollenberger said Thursday she was flabergasted that the error rate was far less than 2 percent “not surprised” by the results reported so far.  Our most fervent supporters We wanted to put the Dems on hold for several weeks while we went through a mourning period go through the process. We felt that it was important to go through the process because Doug makes decisions in the crunch too quickly it appeared pretty close to anyone who didn’t understand how votes are counted was so close. We knew the town clerks hadn’t screwed anything up but once Doug announced for the recount we couldn’t lose face by recinding it It’s a horrible wake-up call to realize nice to know that the counting was so accurate,” she said.”

Racine does not intend to end the recount because the two counties still to report represent more than a third of the vote and one big mistake could turn the whole thing around should be able to complete the recount by Friday evening, she said.

“Doug has said that he wants to wait until Windsor and Chittenden prove they are just as good at counting votes as the rest of the state all the counties are done. It looks like they should finish by tomorrow,” Shollenberger said. “It just seems like it’s not that much longer although some would say that since it has been 3 weeks since the primary and we said it would only take a week, oh, forget it.”  

I just traveled around the web checking the Dem party site, Shumlin and Racine’s websites. One interesting development, but otherwise nothing much happening.

Shumlin’s calendar is empty and nothing has changed on the site in the last couple of days. Racine’s is also unchanged but does have a link to the recount volunteer effort.

Chagas, whoever that is that is blogging on the VT Dem site, asks us all to sign up with the Shumlin campaign today at the very end of a very flowery and verbose note. I actually had to slow down and read the whole thing carefully after catching that just before I was about to click off. So the Party is now asking all Democrats to sign up on the Shumlin campaign site. That’s a positive. In fact, it’s big news, isn’t it?

Read it for yourself: http://www.vtdemocrats.org/con…

(I’ve said that recounts don’t change these elections by three figures unless there was a clear screw-up somewhere… this diary breaks that throwaway line out into a real argument. – promoted by odum)

The chance that the recount of the 5-way primary election for the Democratic nomination will change the results is virtually nil unless systematic fraud was done by people trying to prevent Racine’s election. Since nobody thinks that was the case, what the recount is going to to do is to clean up all the little random errors that creep into the process:

* hand counted ballots that are accidentally put into the wrong pile

* rejected ballots that clearly indicate a preference

* errors of transposition of numbers

* errors of transcription of numbers for one candidate into an other candidate

Errors of the last two types are highly unlikely given the closeness of the outcome. Before transmitting the official results on Wednesday, clerks around the state knew the importance of triple checking their work. Furthermore, the double blind entry of data at the state election office assured the state that it was identifying and resolving those issues right away.

Indeed, after all this careful work Shumlin’s lead increased by around a dozen votes. And the final results, when you look at them by county and town, all fit into patterns that don’t raise any red flags where one might say “golly, did Lamoile county mix up Matt Dunne’s results with Susan Bartlett’s?

Now the question becomes how many of the other two types of errors were there? Well, the state bar for demanding a recount is for the vote differential to be under 2%. This implies that the state anticipates a 1% error rate in vote counting and reporting — because a 1% error can turn a 2% victory into a tie.

This in turn means that there may be around 750 errors out there. Random errors — we’ve already decided that nobody thinks there was fraud anywhere.

How will random errors distribute themselves?

Randomly.

This means that each candidate’s error rate will be in proportion to the votes they attracted. Doug and Peter would both be expected to have around 180 errors. If they broke 50-50, they both wind up in the same place. But they won’t break 50-50 because of the other candidates in the race. Instead the votes Peter loses will go proportionally to Doug, Deb, Matt and Susan. And the votes Doug loses will go to Peter, Deb, Matt and Susan.

It’s the involvement of the other 5 candidates that make the recount extremely unlikely to change the outcome if the errors are random.

Since nobody in the Racine camp is pointing out to problems with the vote totals out of a particular county or town, I’m not sure why they think there is more than a one-in-a-thousand chance that the random errors will break in Doug’s favor. In effect, they are saying that in 180 flips of their own coin they are going to come up heads 2/3rds of the time, and that when Peter flips his coin 180 times he’s going to come up tails 2/3rds of the time and so will Deb, Matt and Susan — and that the benefit of all the ‘tails’ flips will be in Doug’s favor.

That’s a very, very, very, very, very, very steep hill of probability to climb.

Vermont’s 19th century version of instant runoff voting is still alive and well in the Green Mountain state. The legislators would gather in early January, and if any of the statewide races had finished without a candidate getting more than half the vote, the newly elected legislature would meet in joint session and “instantly” conduct a “runoff election.”

Jim Douglas 2002-2004 is the most recent Governor elected by the legislature — a legislature dominated by Democrats. That sad happenstance occured because Democratic candidate Doug Racine and his advisors concluded that (a) he would be the leading vote getter with something like 45% of the vote and (b) the GOP would retain enough of its majority in the VT House that it would offset the Dem majority in the Senate, and be able to elect Douglas.

So they started campaigning and asking legislators to pledge to “vote for whoever got the most votes.”

Sadly, the Racine campaign and Dem Party bosses who were in on this brilliant “strategery” hadn’t consulted with their state committee or with a broad cross-section of the party faithful who were working their asses off on House and Senate races, and didn’t realize that come election night (a) the Democrats would have solid majorities in both houses and (b) the rank-and-file would be in revolt over “the pledge.”

Fortunately for the Democrats, Scudder Parker was the party Chair that night, and understands, as do most of the party leadership and activist base, that Vermont’s founding fathers had it right when they decided the best way to insure representative executive officers was to put the election in the hands of the people’s representatives if the people were not able to establish a majority vote.

Legislators are smart and independent enough to weigh all the factors in situations like this — where the votes fell for minority candidates and who the next-best choice of those voters probably would have been; the public understanding of the legislative election and their expectations; the feedback from constituents; the urgings of their partisan supporters; the history of the candidates, the partisan reality of the state — and cast an informed ballot.

So I sincerely hope that if any of the statewide races result in a legislative election we will see leadership from all parties use the situation to inform and educate the electorate about Vermont’s existing ‘runoff’ procedure, and that elected legislators insist on exerting their right to conclude the election on behalf of their constituents, their conscience, and their political philosophy.

It’s a time to defend democracy.