Wow! That was almost more confusing than sports.
In sports, at least, you have a defined time frame. You have a resolution. You have a contest that ends when it is supposed to end as dictated by the clock on the scoreboard. Well, unless you’re talking about soccer (but we won’t get into that). Or unless the game is tied, in which case it calls for an overtime period. Now, overtime in some sports is referred to as “sudden death,” but that isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds — and it isn’t nearly as dramatic as an election in Clark County.
The results of Tuesday’s primary election apparently were wrapped up by Thursday, when nearly all the ballots had been counted. But on Friday, more outstanding ballots than expected arrived by mail, meaning the resolution was unresolved.
Clark County held a primary and the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election broke out. Hey, as Yogi Berra said and Russell Wilson proved, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
In the end, the new batch of ballots confirmed the expected results. But it was confusing there for a brief time, lending a bit of drama for political junkies.
The most compelling race, of course, was the one for the new position of Clark County council chair. Marc Boldt and Mike Dalesandro ended up advancing to the November general election, edging David Madore with two other candidates languishing far behind. You probably knew that; it’s been in all the papers. But one of the interesting things about the primary contest for council chair is the extremely low number of under votes.
Before we go too far, it is important to note that the election results could hardly be viewed as some sort of mandate one way or another. Turnout for the primary was about 26 percent of registered voters — or about 15 percent of Clark County’s total population. It’s not as though hordes of voters took part in a popular uprising.
That is how elections work — half the battle is convincing people that you are the best candidate, and the other half is convincing them to vote. But those who did bother to vote cared a great deal about the election for county chair.
The tally thus far shows that of those who turned in a ballot, only 0.26 percent of them failed to mark a preference for the county chair position. Compare that with the 2012 election in Clark County, when the under vote in the Obama-Romney presidential race was 0.54 percent. How somebody can turn in a ballot and not bother to vote for president of the United States is beyond me, but it does happen.
He’ll be back
Anyway, the result of all this is that Madore expended more than half the money spent among all Clark County candidates for all the primary races and didn’t even qualify for the general election. And the result of that will be more than a little tension in the county council chambers.
Not that Madore needs an excuse to foment tension; his management style suggests that tension is his sustenance. But the fact that fellow council members Jeanne Stewart and Tom Mielke also were in the race undoubtedly kept Madore from finishing among the top two candidates. Between the three Republicans, they split up 45 percent of the vote; considering that Madore landed about 700 votes shy of what he needed, the 9,400 garnered by Stewart and the 4,000 tallied in Mielke’s column swung the tide of the primary.
That will set the stage for the next couple years in Clark County politics. Of the precincts within Madore’s new District 3 boundary, the one created by last year’s passage of the county charter, he was the top vote-getter. Not by a lot, but by enough to suggest that reports of his political demise are greatly exaggerated. And the council chair position will be open again in 2018, before settling into its usual four-year cycle.
In other words, the guess is that Madore will be back. And the result will be some confusing and dramatic Clark County elections down the road.
