Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Nevada City City Council - the blogger is In.

Tue June 13 update: Barbara's lead has widened, it appears she'll win (see new post).
Previous updates at end of this post.

-------------
Original post, with edit:

...or so it appears, from the vote count reported on the county website: as of 11:45pm Tue, with 4 of 4 precincts reporting, it's:

484 Sheila Stein
420 Barbara Coffman
416 Kerry Arnett
363 Conley Weaver

The two incumbents go down, the two challengers come in.

And - once again, if you ever wonder if your vote really matters* - note the 4 votes separating Barbara from Kerry.

Opinion:
Yes, whether or not a candidate is a blogger shouldn't be a top deciding factor. Yes, we should value forward thinking, visionary candidates who value and want to conserve what's special about our town. But part of being forward thinking is to prepare for what's coming, and - IMHO - it is not going to be pleasant, and we're not going to be better off than we are now; and a no-brainer, in terms of preparing for a difficult future, is to get our affairs in order and our infrastructure in shape. And it hasn't been happening.

--------
Updates:

Wed June 7:
Jumped the gun, the fat lady's not singing yet - it seems absentee ballots that were handed in at the polls on Election Day have still not been tallied. ( details here, or likely soon on Barbara Coffman's blog)
And predicting final results is fraught with uncertainty: while absentee voters as a whole are typically more conservative, and thus would be more likely to increase Barbara's 4-vote lead over Kerry, my guess is that absentee voters who never get around to mailing their ballots in might differ significantly from this norm.
And not just statistically significantly(?) either.

Time will tell.

Thurs June 8:
Barbara, you are sleeping on the job, and you don't even have the job yet; it's time to update your weblog!.

Sat. June 10 update: the Barbara-vs.-Kerry race is(was) still in play; 260 Nevada City ballots remain to be counted, says Yubanet.

1 comment:

Anna Haynes said...

Russ, I agree. The question is, to what degree does the 'evolutionary sociology' of govt act like the 'evolutionary sociology' of science?
(i.e. do we need a changing of the guard, in order to 'steer' in the direction that the new evidence points)

(Typically older scientists have greater resistance to changing their minds, so with new thought/data (e.g. the advent of Darwin's Origin of Species) that produces a sea-change of understanding, the final shift in scientific consensus comes not from adherents to the old views changing their minds - they don't - but from attrition as they leave the field. For example Agassiz never came to accept evolution.)