Donna Frye Update 2

The good news is that a judge through out the lawsuits against Donna's candidacy. There is an article in the S.D. Union today about it. Unfortunately, they haven't published it yet on their web page, so I can't provide a link to it.

The bad news, however, is that I think she is going to lose the election. The count isn't over yet, but the numbers don't look good. So far, the Registrar of Voters is only publishing four numbers. These are:

Total number of write-ins
Number of write-ins confirmed for Donna Frye
Number of votes for Dick Murphy
Number of votes for Ron Roberts

What they aren't saying is how many votes have left to be counted. These votes come in three categories:

First, there are the regular votes that were tabulated electronically. These gave quick results for votes for Ron, Dick and "write-in", but the write-ins had to be counted individually to see how many were for Donna.

Second are the provisional ballots. As I understand it, these from people who went to the voting places but weren't listed as being registered to vote in that location. They were allowed to vote, but there vote only counts if it can be confirmed that they are in fact registered to vote in the city of San Diego, and that they didn't vote in more than one location. These votes have to be verified and counted by hand.

Third are the absentee ballots. This method of voting was devised to allow people to vote even if they aren't in town during the vote, but it is often used by people who just don't like going down to the voting place. These votes also have to be counted by hand.

For a while, the total number of write-ins was way more than the number confirmed for Donna Frye because a lot of the write-ins hadn't been verified yet. However, lately, those numbers have been stabilizing. Here are some examples of those numbers:

11-07-04:

Write-In 127,641
Verified: D. Frye 24,473
Dick Murphy 123,822
Ron Roberts 112,314

11-14-04

Write-In 149,979
Verified: D. Frye 146,291
Dick Murphy 147,585

11-16-04:

Write-In 151,759
Verified: D. Frye 146,737
Dick Murphy 149,928
Ron Roberts 135,486

As you can see, the numbers over the last few days have been increasing by about the same amount for all of the candidates. (The first two sets of numbers came from my previous blogs. Unfortunately, on 11-14 I didn't include Ron Roberts numbers.) I think this means that all of the write-ins on the normal ballots have been verified, and all that remains is to count the provisional and absentee ballots. The difference between the "Write-In" numbers and the "Verified: D. Frye" numbers indicates the number of write-ins that were not for Donna.

This means that there are no more non-verified write-ins, and that the rest of the numbers show the true results minus the provisional and absentee ballots that have not yet been counted. Since these ballots are as likely to vote for Dick or Ron as for Donna, all of their numbers should continue to go up at roughly the same rate.

Also, I notice that Dick's numbers are going up slightly faster than Donna's. I think this is due to the absentee ballots, since people who are not in San Diego write now are less likely to have been aware that Donna was running, and would not have written her name in. Also, many absentee ballots are turned in early, and thus would have been turned in before Donna's campaign got fully under way.

Anyway, that's my prediction. I haven't seen any of these ideas raised anywhere else, so there could be a flaw in my reasoning, but it seems valid to me.