{"id":10716,"date":"2007-11-07T10:05:58","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T15:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/07\/10716.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:41","slug":"hold-your-council","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/11\/07\/hold-your-council\/","title":{"rendered":"hold your council"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and the municipal election went more or less as I expected it to. As Gentle Readers will recall from an earlier rant<\/a>, we have a bizarre system where voters choose six out of twelve candidates, and the top nine sit on the council. It turns out my town has something like 40,000 potential voters, of whom 40% are Democrats, 37.5% are unaffiliated, and the rest are Republicans. So you can see how this is going to go.
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I don’t have, unfortunately, the final official tallies. It looks like around 12,750 people voted; the following approximate numbers are based on an estimate of 13,000 total votes, just to make my typing easier. The top vote-getter was a Democrat; 70% of the voters cast votes for him. The next was a Democrat with 65% of the vote, then another Democrat with just under 65% of the vote, then a Democrat with 64.3% of the vote, then a Democrat with 64.2% of the vote, then a Democrat with 62% of the vote. Those were the six Democrats, and they are all on the Council.
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Then we go to the Republicans. 34.5% of the voters cast ballots for the top Republican, followed by another Republican with 34% and a Republican with 33.8%. Those all sit on the Council, too. Then there’s a drop down to a Republican with 32% of the vote, one with 31.5% of the vote, and one with 31% of the vote. They are out. The difference between the third and fourth Republican (the ninth and tenth candidate, the difference between on and off the council) was 232 votes, or about 1.8% of the vote. This makes me a bit cross, because that third Republican is the one I knew was crazy, who is quoted in this morning’s Hartford Courant<\/a> as saying “We’re going to root out the Democrats.”
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Now, I’m a trifle cranky about the outcome of the election, because I think that twelve-choose-six-get-nine is a bizarre way to choose a Council, and because I don’t want to be rooted out. On the other hand, since broadly speaking two-thirds of the voters preferred Democrats and one-third preferred Republicans, and the Town Council will be two-thirds Democrats and one-third Republicans, it seems almost representative. And voting was clearly far more along Party lines than I had anticipated, which I think is largely a Good Thing, so I shouldn’t be cranky about that. One crazy on a nine-person Council might not be such a bad thing, either, although, you know, yes, it probably is a bad thing.
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Well, I’ll see how it works out. This may be a quietish term, actually, since we’ve just finished both an enormous downtown development project and a massive property tax reappraisal, so this should be a term of settling down and doing the little things, like keeping bears out of our schoolyards.
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And in a couple of years, they’ll have another election.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger nobly refrains from naming names, particularly \u201cJoe\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18158,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10716\/revisions\/18158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}